THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


WRITINGS  AND   SPEECHES 


STEWAKT, 


SLAVERY. 


EDITED    BY 

LUTHER    RAWSON"    MARSH. 


NEW  YORK : 
A.  B.  BUEDICK,  145  NASSAU  STEEET. 

1860. 


ENTERED  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  yeur  1860,  by 
LUTHER    R.    MARSH, 

In  the  Clerk's  Office  of  the  District  Court  of  the  United  States  for  the  Southern  District  of 
New  York. 


W.  a.  TINSON,  Stereotyper.  GEO.  RUSSELL  &  Co.,  Printers. 


GENERAL  CONTENTS. 


PORTRAIT 1 

PREFACE 6 

PRELIMINARY  CHAPTER ' 9 

SCOPE  OF  THE  BOOK  (LETTER),  1846 40 

FIRST  PUBLISHED  SPEECH  AGAINST  SLAVERY,  1835 50 

RESPONSE  TO  Gov.  MAKCY'S  MESSAGE,  1836 58 

ADDRESS  AT  IST  ANNUAL  MEETING  OF  N.  Y.  A.  S.  SOCIETY,  1836 86 

VARIOUS  EXTRACTS 108 

SPEECH  ON  RIGHT  OF  PETITION,  PENNSYLVANIA  HALL,  1838 118 

SPEECH  ON  THE  GREAT  ISSUES  BETWEEN  RIGHT  AND  WRONG,  PENNSYL- 
VANIA HALL,  1838 129 

LETTERS  TO  SAMUEL  WEBB,  1838 155 

SPEECH  BEFORE  THE  LEGISLATURE  OF  VERMONT 160 

EXTRACTS  FROM  SPEECH  BEFORE  THE  GENERAL  ASSEMBLY  OF  THE  PRE%- 

BYTERIAN  CHURCH,  PHILADELPHIA,  1839 186 

SPEECH  IN  ANSWER  TO  HENRY  CLAY,  1839 195 

LETTER  TO  Gov.  GILMER,  OF  VIRGINIA,  1841 219 

NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS,  ALBANY,  1840 234 

3 


1763571 


iv  GENERAL   CONTENTS. 

PAGB 

LETTER  TO  SAMUEL  WEBB,  1842 248 

LETTEK  TO  DR.  BAILEY,  1842 250 

ARGUMENT,  IK  THE  CASES  OF  THE  STATE  v.  VAN  BUREN,  AND  THE  STATE 

AQAIN8T    POST,   ON  THE    QUESTION    WHETHER    SLAVERY  WAS  ABOL- 
ISHED BY  THE  CONSTITUTION  OP  NEW  JERSEY,  ADOPTED  IN  1844, 1845.  272 

ARGUMENT  IN  ABOVE  CASE,  IN  EEPLY 352 

LETTER  TO  DR.  BAILEY,  1845 368 

THE  ACT  OP  1793,1843 377 

K2PLY  TO  THE  JUNIUS  TRACT,  1843 389 

SELECTIONS 398 

EEPLY  TO  DEMOCRATIC  EEVIEW,  1845 40D 

PROSPECTS  OF  LIBERTY,  1846 418 

TABLE  OF  EEFERENCES 421 


P  E  E  F  A  C  E. 


IT  was  originally  the  design  of  the  compiler  to  have  ap- 
pended the  writings  and  speeches  of  Mr.  Stewart,  as  well  on 
slavery  as  other  topics,  to  a  memoir  of  his  life,  now  in  pre- 
paration. But  the  variety  and  length  of  these  anti-slavery 
productions,  and  the  peculiar  interest  with  which  these 
questions  are  now  debated,  have  induced  me  to  publish,  some 
entire  and  some  in  part,  selections  of  his  speeches  and  writ- 
ings relating  to  that  tangled  problem,  whose  present  is  so 
fraught  with  difficulty  and  danger,  and  whose  future 
hangs  portentously  in  cloud.  We  may  hope,  I  think,  that 
if  there  can  be  any  solution,  by  mortals,  of  this  great  and 
complicated  subject,  it  will  be  discovered  by  the  earnest  gaze 
of  millions  of  men,  now  directed  to  it.  And  when  an  origi- 
nal thinker  like  Mr.  Stewart,  moved  by  disinterested 
impulse,  and  an  ardent  love  of  truth,  has  for  years  applied 
the  powers  of  his  mind  to  a  consideration  of  the  problem,  in 
all  its  ramifications,  it  may  aid  the  national  discussion  of  it — 
employing,  or  destined  soon  to  employ,  the  tongues  and  pens 
of  the  whole  country — if  the  opinions  and  arguments,  thus 


VI  PREFACE. 

wrought  out  in  the  first  stage  of  the  controversy,  shall  be 
gathered  and  given  to  the  public — if  right,  to  triumph,  if 
wrong,  to  suffer  overthrow. 

Among  the  earliest  and  most  persistent  of  those  who 
enlisted  to  resist  the  aggression  of  the  slave  power,  and  to 
combat  the  injustice  of  the  slave  system,  a  full  history  of  his 
labors  and  cooperation,  Avould  reveal  the  thorny  path  which 
these  reformers  were  obliged  to  tread,  and  the  mode  by 
which  the  mighty  question,  from  being  generally  ignored 
and  buried  in  forgetfulness,  has,  amid  the  stormiest  oppo- 
sition and  the  fiercest  threats,  now  at  last,  in  the  space  of 
twenty-seven  years,  loomed  up  in  its  gigantic  proportions, 
before  the  anxious  gaze  of  the  Republic  and  the  world. 
But  as  my  object  here  is  to  let  the  arguments  of  Mr. 
Stewart  stand  or  fall  by  themselves,  I  have  only  space  to 
give,  independent  of  what  may  be  obtained  from  the  writings 
themselves,  a  cursory  view  of  a  few  of  the  prominent  events 
of  his  career,  as  connected  with  this  topic. 

Those  who  may  read  these  addresses  will  be  surprised,  I 
doubt  not,  that  the  author,  in  the  very  opening  of  the  discus- 
sion, should  have  so  fully  surveyed  the  subject  in  its  length 
and  breadth,  with  a  glance  at  once  so  comprehensive  and 
minute,  and  have  preoccupied,  so  thoroughly,  the  whole 
field  now  filled  by  the  advancing  debate ;  as  if,  with  his  fear- 
less associates,  bearing  the  standard  of  the  army  of  Freedom, 
he  marched,  twenty-seven  years  ago,  as  "  a  moral  recruiting 
sergeant "  (for  so  he  styled  himself)  into  the  wilderness,  and 
firmly  planted  the  ensign  upon  a,  summit,  around  which  the 


PKEFACE.  VU 

van  are  now  assembling,  but  not  yet  reached  by  the  on- 
ward hosts. 

In  anticipation,  therefore,  of  a  biography,  not  yet  complete, 
hereafter  to  appear,  to  consist  of  autobiographical  sketches, 
professional  speeches  and  anecdotes,  addresses  on  Internal 
Improvements,  Tariffs,  Education,  and  other  topics  of  public 
interest,  extracts  from  journals  and  correspondence,  tem- 
perance orations,  and  the  current  narrative  of  his  life — I  hare 
arranged  and  now  give  to  Humanity  the  following  thoughts 
of  Alvan  Stewart,  in  its  behalf,  the  promulgation  of  which, 
in  his  day,  though  restricted  by  prejudice  from  an  extensive 
circulation,  yet  cost  him  the  sacrifice  of  popularity,  and  many 
friends. 

This  statement  is  due  to  those  who,  yet  holding  the 
author  in  remembrance,  are  often  inquiring  for  his  Life,  and 
who  might  else  suppose  this  to  be  the  memoir  they  knew  to 
be  in  progress,  instead  of,  as  it  is,  a  single  phase  of  a  character, 
broad,  catholic  and  interesting. 

LUTHER  R.  MAESH. 

NEW  YORK,  May,  1860. 


AL  V  AN     STEWART. 


PRELIMINARY  CHAPTEE, 

BY   THE   EDITOR. 
ALVAN  STEWART  AS  AN  ANTI-SLAVERY  MAN. 

IN"  a  great  moral  contest,  the  man  who,  in  his  life-time,  has 
fought  bravely  for  what  he  deemed  the  right,  does  not  cease 
to  battle  when  he  is  dead.  The  thoughts  he  forged — his 
moral  and  intellectual  weapons — still  lay  on  the  field  of  action, 
inviting  the  grasp  of  those  who  may  succeed  him  in  the  con- 
test. Eleven  years  have  gone  their  rounds  since  Alvan 
Stewart  was  removed  from  his  warfare  in  the  cause  of 
human  rights,  but  we  shall  find,  I  think,  that  no  arms  since 
wrought,  have  a  keener  edge,  a  heartier  stroke,  or  a  more 
ponderous  weight,  than  those  his  hands  let  drop,  when  he 
could  lift  them  no  longer. 

Mr.  Stewart  was,  early  in  life,  impressed  with  the  evil  of 
slavery,  and,  in  October,  1816 — nearly  half  a  century  ago — 
while  detained  at  Charlottesville,  Virginia,  by  a  personal 
injury,  he  wrote  to  his  friend,  Judge  Morse,  of  Cherry 

Valley: 

1* 


10  ALVAN   STEWART 

The  blacks  have  corrupted  the  whites  beyond  conception.  Vir- 
ginia may  bid  farewell  to  slavery,  in  time,  if  the  blacks  improve  by 
mixture  for  a  hundred  years,  as  they  have  for  the  last  century. 
Curses  on  the  Dutchman  who  sold  the  first  cargo  of  slaves  at  James- 
town, in  1620. 

And  when  the  subject  began  to  be  agitated  at  the  North, 
about  1833,  and  the  anti-slavery  sentiment  to  assume  an 
organized  form,  Mr.  Stewart  became  convinced  that  slavery 
was  a  crime,  and  that  duty  demanded  the  exercise  of  all 
legitimate  and  constitutional  efforts  to  restore  the  slave  to 
his  rights  and  to  himself. 

Yielding  to  the  requisition  of  conscience,  he  consecrated 
himself  to  the  cause.  He  organized  societies,  delivered 
addresses,  wrote  reports  and  essays,  collected  and  expended 
money,  and  travelled  far  and  wide.  He  was  of  the  most 
active  and  efficient  of  those  men  of  the  dawn-light,  who 
enlisted  in  the  morning  of  the  enterprise.  He  founded  an 
anti-slavery  society  at  Utica,  of  which  he  was  elected  presi- 
dent. But  from  the  beginning,  he,  and  they  who  acted  with 
him,  encountered  the  most  determined  and  vindictive  op- 
position. The  doctrines  they  enunciated  were  covered  with 
odium.  Every  advance  was  in  the  face  of  ridicule  and 
reproach.  Threats  of  personal  violence  we're  lavishly  out- 
poured. Public  feeling  was  so  excited  that  it  was  scarcely 
safe  for  a  man  to  repeat  the  very  words  of  the  fathers  of  the 
Republic  on  the  subject.  But  neither  he,  nor  those  with 
whom  he  acted — the  very  heroes  of  reform — were  to  be 
deterred,  by  any  personal  considerations,  from  pursuing  what 
seemed  to  them  the  path  of  duty ;  and,  until  the  close  of  his 


AS    AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  11 

life,  in  1849,  we  find  him  constant  to  his  first  convictions,  and 
strenuous  in  his  labor  to  advance  them,  equally  diligent  and 
bold,  whether  amidst  applause  or  menaces,  whether  in  the 
kindred  and  sympathetic  circle — small  though  it  was — that 
approved  him,  or  ostracized  by  society  and  party ;  whether 
health  gave  vigor  to  his  voice  and  action,  or  his  pen  was 
feebly  held  from  the  illness  that  assailed  him. 

"  You  must  know,"  he  says,  in  a  letter  to  las  sister,  "that  in  six 
months  I  have  travelled  not  less  than  6,000  miles  in  running  to  and 
fro  on  the  earth,  pleading  for  the  slave.  I  have  done  four  times 
more  labor  for  him  this  year,  than  in  any  previous  one.  God  be 
praised,  our  cause  is  doing  nobly  in  Maine,  Massachusetts,  Ohio, 
Michigan  and  New  York." 

Again  he  writes : 

OTICI,  November  2, 1842. 
DEAE  BAILEY: 

SIR  ;  I  ought  to  be  extremely  thankful  to  the  Giver  of  all  good, 
to  be  enabled  to  say,  that  the  month  of  October  just  past,  in  point 
of  labor,  has  been  the  most  favorable  of  my  life,  as  I  have  been 
enabled  to  do  more  than  in  any  other  month  of  my  existence,  to  aid 
the  cause  of  man-hood  struggling  to  throw  off  its  thing-hood. 
October,  with  its  wild  winds,  howling  tempests,  descending  raina 
and  falling  snow,  disrobing  the  bygone  summer  of  its  queenly 
attire,  to  put  on  the  solemn  dress  for  the  winter  solstice,  seems  more 
than  any  other  month,  in  this  latitude,  to  warn  us  of  the  valne  of 
time,  its  fleetness,  the  brevity  of  the  summer  of  human  life,  how 
soon  all  that  is  bright  and  beautiful  must  lie  covered  with  the  shroud, 
and  how  truly,  with  most  of  us,  it  may  be  said,  that  in  the  cares  and 
sorrows  of  each  single  day,  we  lose  sight  of  the  chief  object  of  exist- 
ence, until  the  great  harvest  is  past,  and  at  the  end  of  our  journey, 
learn  that  we  have  entirely  mistaken  the  right  road.  The  Anti- 
slavery  Liberty  men  of  this  State  have  made  September  and  October 
the  campaign  months,  in  which  the  war  against  slavery  has  raged 
with  more  than  its  accustomed  vigor. 


12  ALVAN  STEWART 

THE   SLAVERY   MOB   OF    1835. 

Upon  the  announcement  that  a  meeting  of  the  Utica 
Anti-slavery  Society  would  be  held  on  the  evening  of  the 
llth  August,  1835,  placards  were  posted  around  the  city, 
requiring  all  good  citizens,  who  were  opposed  to  interfering 
with  the  concerns  of  the  South  in  the  rights  and  privileges 
guaranteed  to  them  by  the  Constitution,  to  attend.  The 
rumor  of  an  expected  riot  spread  through  the  town. 

Fear  of  a  serious  disturbance  kept  some  of  the  members 
of  the  society  away.  The  house  was  crowded  to  suffocation, 
above  and  below.  Mr.  Stewart,  the  president,  delivered  an 
address.  But  the  public  had  not  yet  quite  reached  the  con- 
clusion, that,  in  this  country,  free  discussion  should  be 
interdicted,  and  the  evening  passed  without  any  attempt  at 
violence. 

Mr.  Stewart  then  drafted  a  call  for  a  State  Convention,  to 
be  held  at  TJtica,  on  the  21st  of  October,  1835,  for  the  pur- 
pose of  forming  a  New  York  State  Anti-slavery  Society. 
This  call  was  signed  by  himself  and  others,  to  the  number  of 
438,  in  different  portions  of  the  State.  Upon  its  announce- 
ment, the  people  were  in  arms.  Prominent  and  influential 
men  rushed  to  the  attack.  Streams  of  indignant  calumny, 
from  a  hundred  presses,  were  poured  upon  the  writer  of  the 
call  and  his  associates. 

In  the  county  of  Oneida,  and  particularly  in  Utica,  the 
excitement  was  vehement,  and  deepened  in  intensity  as  the 
time  approached.  For  days  and  weeks  before  the  Conven 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  13 

tion,  it  was  the  subject  of  exasperated  conversation  and 
threatening  denunciation  at  every  corner.  The  most  violent 
passions  were  aroused  against  it,  and  its  projectors. 

On  the  16th  of  October,  the  Common  Council  of  the  City 
of  Utica,  by  a  vote  of  7  to  4,  granted  permission  to  the  pro- 
posed Convention,  to  hold  its  session  in  the  court-rooms  at 
the  Academy.  On  the  next  day  a  large  concourse  of  many 
of  the  most  respectable  citizens  of  Utica  gathered,  in  indig- 
nation, at  the  court-rooms,  to  repudiate  the  action  of  the 
Council.  Resolutions  were  adopted,  charging  the  vote  to 
be  a  flagrant  usurpation  of  power — a  direct  indignity  to 
the  good  citizens  of  Utica — that  the  meeting  would  not 
submit  to  the  disgrace  of  an  abolition  assemblage  in  a  pub- 
lic building  of  the  city,  reared  by  the  contribution  of  its 
citizens,  and  designed  to  be  used  for  salutary  public  objects, 
and  not  as  a  receptacle  for  deluded  fanatics,  or  reckless  incen- 
diaries, and  that  it  was  the  incumbent  duty  of  every  citizen 
to  use  all  lawful  and  proper  means  to  avert  the  disgrace 
which  would  rest  on  the  city  if  the  Convention  were  suffered 
to  assemble. 

As  the  time  approached,  great  preparations  were  made  by 
the  opponents  of  the  Convention  to  prevent  it.  Bullies  from 
the  Sixth  Ward  in  New  York  were  imported  for  the  occa- 
sion. Orders  were  given  to  grocers  to  distribute  liquors  gra- 
tuitously to  the  mob.  A  bloody  collision  seemed  inevitable. 
But  there  were  men  in  this  reform  who  knew  not  fear.  Lewis 
Tappan,  of  New  York,  who  did  not  intend  to  be  present, 
on  hearing  that,  if  he  did,  he  was  to  be  the  recipient  of  a 


14:  ALVAN   8TEWABT 

coat  of  tar  and  feathers,  put  himself  to  much  personal 
inconvenience,  that  he  might  be  there  to  witness  the  per- 
formance. Notwithstanding  the  threatening  storm,  the  Con- 
vention met,  pursuant  to  the  call,  at  the  Second  Presbyterian 
Church. 

Promptly,  as  the  clock  struck  the  hour  of  meeting,  it  was 
called  to  order  by  Mr.  Stewart,  who  addressed  the  assem- 
blage. He  had  the  entire  programme  arranged  and  prepared 
so  as  to  perfect,  speedily,  the  organization  of  a  State  Anti- 
Slavery  Society,  and  accomplish  the  business  portion  of  the 
meeting,  before  any  disturbance  should  overtake  them  :  for 
it  was  well  known  that  an  excited  and  angry  meeting,  led 
by  some  of  the  most  influential  politicians  of  the  city  of 
Utica,  indeed  of  the  State,  was  then  in  session  a  block  or  two 
off,  at  the  Court  House,  and  it  was  every  moment  expected 
that  that  assembly  would  come,  en  masse,  to  the  church, 
to  prevent,  by  force,  the  organization  of  the  Convention. 
Through  Mr.  Stewart's  generalship  and  promptness  the  Con- 
vention was  organized,  the  Constitution  he  had  prepared 
was  read  and  adopted,  the  officers  appointed,  and  the  new 
society  launched,  as  an  organized  body,  before  the  clumsy, 
but  furious  mob  arrived.  While  Mr.  Lewis  Tappan  was 
reading  a  declaration  of  the  sentiments  of  the  Convention, 
the  force,  in  the  form  of  a  numerous  committee  of  the  citi- 
zens of  Utica  who  had  been  appointed  at  the  Court  House 
meeting,  entered  the  church,  followed  by  an  enraged  mob 
which  crowded  the  building.  The  committee  demanded  to 
be  heard.  The  multitude  shouted.  It  was  impossible  even 


AS  AN  ANTI-SLAVEEY  MAN.  15 

for  a  Stentor  to  lift  his  voice  above  the  terrific  din.  Alder- 
man Kellogg, — a  man  of  great  personal  strength — was  seized, 
struck,  and  his  coat  torn  to  pieces.  The  proceedings  of  the 
Convention  Avere  drowned  in  the  yells,  oaths,  tread,  and  rush 
of  the  frantic  throng.  Mr.  Stewart  vainly  attempted  to  be 
heard.  Angry  menaces  at  intervals,  as  the  crowd  paused  for 
breath,  rang  through  the  church.  The  aged  secretary,  a  cler- 
gyman and  a  Revolutionary  soldier,  was  rudely  handled  and 
his  papers  seized.  The  brave  old  man  would  not  surrender 
them,  but  scattered  them  defiantly  in  the  air.  The  Conven- 
tion, unable  to  proceed  in  this  deafening  uproar,  adjourned, 
and  the  delegates  left  the  house  amid  a  shower  of  threats 
and  imprecations. 

"  I  was  standing  near  Mr.  Stewart,"  says  Mr.  Storms,  "  at 
the  height  of  the  excitement,  and  saw  a  porter,  named  Mat- 
thews, a  canal  runner,  and  a  powerful  man,  take  hold  of 
him.  Stewart  had  been  long  enfeebled  by  poor  health,  but 
his  dormant  nmscles  waked  up  at  the  touch  of  his  assailant ; 
his  whole  soul  seemed  in  his  arms,  as  he  lifted  the  stout  por- 
ter from  his  feet  and  tossed  him  off,  like  a  fly. 

It  was  always  a  mystery  to  Matthews  how  his  strong  new- 
coat  was  rent  in  twain  (unnoticed  at  the  time)  as  he  was  flung 
from  Stewart's  giant  grasp." 

After  the  adjournment,  the  hotels  were  visited  by  sections 
of  the  mob,  and  the  foreign  delegates  ejected.  The  excite- 
ment did  not  abate.  In  the  evening  the  mob  demolished  the 
Anti-Slavery  printing  office — destroyed  its  furniture,  and 
strewed  the  street  with  the  offending  types.  Mysterious 


16  ALVAN   STEWAET 

rumors  indicated  that  a  night  attack  was  contemplated  upon 
Mr.  Stewart's  house. 

Mr.  Stewart,  becoming  convinced  that  the  mob  was  in 
earnest  in  its  designs  to  assail  his  mansion,  went  about  the 
necessary  preparations  for  defence.  Carpenters  were  imme- 
diately employed ;  hasty  barricades,  consisting  of  large  tim- 
bers, were  put  up  at  the  doors  and  windows.  A  number  of 
friends  were  assembled,  who  were  of  the  right  stuff,  and  fifty 
muskets  obtained  and  loaded,  and  all  was  ready  for  action. 
Stewart  directed  the  defences  deliberately,  but  with  earnest- 
ness and  decision.  One  of  the  members  of  the  convention, 
from  abroad,  who  was  present,  said,  "  Mr.  Stewart,  I  can't 
stay  with  you,  I  am  a  peace  man."  "  So  am  I,"  replied  he, 
"  but  this  house  is  my  castle.  It  is  my  duty  to  defend  this 
household,  and  I  shall  do  it.  I  am  captain  of  this  fort,  and 
if  they  come,  I'll  mow  down  fifty  of  them,  in  the  name  of  the 
Lord."  It  became  rumored  in  the  town  that  a  cordial  recep- 
tion at  Stewart's  house  might  be  anticipated.  Scouts  were 
sent  forth  to  spy  out  the  position  of  affairs.  Their  reports 
were  not  favorable  to  the  safety  of  the  enterprise,  and  the 
contemplated  assault  was  totally  abandoned. 

The  members  of  the  Convention,  the  next  day,  accepted 
the  invitation  of  Gerrit  Smith,  Esq.,  and  proceeded  some  forty 
miles  to  Peterboro',  to  continue  their  deliberations.  They 
were  pelted  on  the  way  with  stones,  mud,  and  eggs  not  of 
the  freshest,  as  they  marched,  as  it  were,  through  an  enemy's 
country. 

Such  were  some  of  the  difficulties  which  the  pioneers  in 


AS  AN  ANTI-SLAVEEY  MAN.  17 

this  movement  had  to  meet  and  overcome,  and  such  the 
excited  state  of  that  public  mind  on  which  they  wished  to 
make  an  impression.  What  a  change  has  come  over  the  sen- 
timent of  the  North,  since  that  period ! 

I  give,  in  this  volume,  the  speech  of  Mr.  Stewart  at  this 
Convention,  as  reported ;  for,  though  the  subject  had  not 
fully  ripened  in  his  mind,  it  is  yet  interesting  as  one  of  the 
very  leaders  of  that  great  discussion,  by  tongue  and  pen, 
which  has  since  ensued. 

In  a  libel  suit,  brought  by  a  lawyer,  for  being  charged  with 
inciting  the  mob  to  assaiilt  the  Convention,  on  its  way  to 
Peterboro',  Mr.  Stewart,  in  summing  up  for  the  defence, 
said: 

No  opinion  is  matter  of  visitation  by  a  mob.  There  is  no  evil  so 
great,  but  a  mob  is  greater.  It  overthrows  our  social  system.  In 
monarchies,  the  armed  soldiery  defend  liberty. 

This  advocate  who  complains  tbat  the  defendant  charged  him  with 
inciting  the  mob  to  attack  the  Abolitionists,  would  destroy  northern 
liberty  to  support  slavery.  Liberty,  it  seems,  is  to  be  preserved  by 
putting  a  town  in  uproar,  by  banishing  600  people,  by  driving  men 
from  their  beds,  by  taking  life. 

It  was  all  done  to  advance  liberty,  by  tbis  second  Cincinnatus — this 
lawyer,  and  bis  professional  coadjutor,  sitting  up  nights  to  take  care 
of  tbe  liberty  of  their  country.  Kather  were  they  trying  to  pull  the 
rope  of  the  curfew  bell  of  American  freedom. 

These  Abolitionists  were  fleeing  from  a  mob  at  Utica ;  but  they  ran 
from  Scylla  to  Charybdis — tbey  ran  from  tbe  giant  of  mobs,  and  were 
brought  up  by  the  squadrons  of  tbese  two  captains  of  rotten  eggs — 
these  egg-and-mud  marshals.  Instead  of  tbe  deep  learning  and  pens 
of  those  two  promising  props  of  the  country  being  employed,  to  show 
that  tbe  Abolitionists  were  wrong,  mud  and  eggs  were  used,  as  a 
safer  kind  of  logic  in  tbeir  hands,  tban  the  artillery  of  the  mind. 


18  ALVAN   STEWAKT 

These  men  thought  that  they  were  a  portion  of  that  salutary  public 
opinion  of  the  United  States,  which  governors  have  told  you  was  the 
medicine  to  bring  the  friends  of  liberty  to  their  senses. 

George  Thompson,  then  in  this  country,  writes  him  from 

BOSTON,  October  2, 1888. 

DEAR  SIB: 

Your  favor  of  the  22d  ult.,  inviting  me  to  the  New  York  Con- 
vention to  be  held  on  the  21st,  is  before  me.  I  hope,  God  willing,  to 
be  present.  It  will  indeed  be  delightful  to  meet  the  friends  of  the 
glorious  cause  in  such  a  meeting,  for  such  a  purpose.  May  He  who 
rules  the  elements  in  the  moral  as  in  the  physical  world  grant  us  his 
presence,  and  make  the  Convention,  however  it  may  be  assailed,  the 
means  of  promoting  his  glory  and  the  interests  of  the  oppressed. 

The  call  is  nobly  signed.  The  pro-slavery  prints  may  well  be  dis- 
concerted. It  i's  ludicrous  to  hear  the  "  Journal  of  Commerce  "  talk 
of  a  death  struggle.  Had  the  sapient  prognosticators  who  manage 
that  paper  judged  rightly,  they  would  have  read  that  document  as 
the  annunciation  of  the  approaching  advent  of  an  infant  Hercules — 
ordained  to  seize  the  monster  by  the  throat. 

The  State  Society,  when  formed,  will  be  a  weighty  link  in  the 
chain  of  causes. 

My  kind  regards  to  all  around. 

Very  truly  yours, 

GEO.  THOMPSON. 

The  Abolitionists  had  grown  into  such  formidable  propor- 
tions, that  Governor  Marcy,  in  his  annual  message  for  1836, 
thought  fit  to  administer  to  them  a  severe  rebuke.  This 
called  out  a  reply  from  Mr.  Stewart,  hereafter  given,  of  which 
he  thus  speaks  in  a  letter  to  Mr.  Tappan  : 

UTICA,  nth  February,  1836. 

LEWIS  TAPPAN,  ESQ. 

DEAR  SIB  :  I  venture  to  introduce  to  your  consideration  a  rather 
surly  child  of  mine.  You  will  find  the  child  in  the  "Standard  and 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVEEY   MAN.  19 

Democrat,"  printed  in  this  city,  and  I  intend  to  send  it  to  Governor 
Marcy  to  nurse. 

To  d_rop  a  figure,  a  communication  of  seven  or  eight  columns  di- 
rected to  Marcy,  and  signed  by  my  name,  exhibiting  my  views  of  the 
Abolition  part  of  his  turgid  message,  especially  on  the  Constitution 
of  this  State  and  of  the  Union,  which  two  Constitutions  furnish  the 
highest  defence  against  all  assaults,  if  we  can  have  the  benefit  of 
them.  I  trust  that  I  have  been  so  fortunate  as  to  present  some  few 
views  on  the  Constitutions  which  are  neither  threadbare  nor  hack- 
neyed, which  will  not  impede,  if  they  do  not  hasten,  the  cause  we  love. 
The  production  is  intended  to  prevent  legislation  by  this  State.  I 
have  no  means  of  multiplying  copies  beyond  the  single  edition  of  a 
newspaper ;  perhaps  it  is  well  I  have  not. 

But  if  our  Executive  Committee  should  think  it  might  aid  us  in 
preventing  legislation  in  this  State,  or  anywhere  else,  they  are  wel- 
come to  use  it  in  any  shape  or  form  they  please. 

I  think  it  our  duty  to  express  our  notions  on  Constitutional  Law, 
as  well  as  our  adversaries ;  it  is  all  on  our  side. 

Theodore  Weld  is  lecturing,  and  has  been  for  four  nights,  in  the  Mob- 
Convention-Church,  in  Utica,  to  the  admiration  of  hundreds.  The 
house  is  strained  every  night.  He  will  stay  here  till  March.  Not  a 
dog  wags  his  tongue,  mob-like,  against  us.  The  days  of  mobs  are 
gone  by.  Mr.  "Weld  is  one  of  the  most  astonishing  men  of  the  age. 
He  is  logic  and  eloquence. 

"We  are  gaining ;  our  cause  goes  forward  with  great  success. 

Mr.  Weld  will  go,  in  March,  and  lecture  two  or  three  weeks  in 
Eochester,  and  then,  after  that,  two  or  three  weeks  in  Buffalo,  and 
then  return  to  this  county  and  make  this  county  the  head-quarters 
of  his  efforts  for  some  time. 

New  Jersey  and  this  State  will  be  the  two  States,  if  any,  which 
will  pass  laws  abridging  our  rights.  I  feel  it,  therefore,  our  duty  to 
throw  every  obstruction  before  their  despotic  wheels  in  our  power. 

Please  lay  this  before  your  Executive  Committee.     Accept  of  the 
assurances  of  my  most  affectionate  esteem  and  Christian  respect  for 
yourself  and  coadjutors  in  the  cause  of  humanity. 
Your  friend,         • 

AXVAN  STEWAET. 


20  ALVAN   STEWART 

Alvan  Stewart  was  an  undoubted  abolitionist — that  is 
to  say,  in  favor  not  only  of  the  non-extension  of  slavery,  but 
of  its  abolition.  Yet  great  misapprehension  prevails  on  this 
subject.  It  will  not  be  found,  I  think,  that  he  ever  advo- 
cated any  infringement  on  the  rights  of  the  South — that  he 
was  of  those  (as  all  abolitionists  seem  to  be  supposed  to  be) 
who  would  endeavor,  by  force,  to  interfere  with  the  condi- 
tion of  affairs  at  the  South — that  he  desired  to  violate  any 
syllable  of  the  Constitution.  He  stood  by  the  Constitution 
of  the  Union — by  the  Union  itself — with  all  his  might.  He 
considered  that  instrument  as  a  document  of  liberty,  and 
held  that  slavery  was  contrary  to  its  benign  provisions.  His 
arguments,  to  prove  this,  are  now  given  to  the  public ;  and 
it  might  not  be  hazardous  to  prophesy,  that,  th*ough 
delivered  in  their  time,  in  the  face  of  party  rancor,  and 
amidst  the  sneers  of  the  body  of  the  people,  saved  from 
extinction  only  by  the  genius  with  which  he  invested  them, 
they  will,  if  not  by  the  present,  yet  by  some  future  gene- 
ration, come  to  be  regarded  as  displaying  the  clearest 
insight,  and  giving  the  loftiest  interpretation  to  that  great 
compact  of  the  people  of  the  States. 

He  lent  no  countenance  to  that  radicalism  which  lifts  its 
sword  against  the  government  of  the  country. 

What  the  Constitution  does  mean,  how  its  various  provi- 
sions are  to  be  construed,  are,  surely,  legitimate  subjects 
of  debate.  Men  have  not  always  agreed,  do  not  now 
agree,  as  to  this  construction.  Chief  Justice  Marshall  owes 
his  renown  to  his  judicial  construction  of  portions  of  this 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  21 

instrument,  and  Daniel  Webster,  in  its  discussion,  added 
new  laurels  to  his  brow  as  a  great  forensic  orator.  Those 
of  its  provisions,  which,  on  the  one  side,  are  supposed  to 
prove  that  that  document  acknowledged  slavery,  and,  on 
the  other,  were  claimed  to  make  it  a  document  of  liberty,  it 
was  the  desire  of  Mr.  Stewart  to  discuss,  to  bring  up  for  fair 
and  full  consideration  before  the  minds  of  the  American 
people,  and  that  they  should  render  their  honest  verdict 
thereon,  at  the  ballot-box. 

It  was  not  always  the  fortune  of  Mr.  Stewart  to  agree,  on 
every  point,  with  ah1  those  who  have  associated  with  him  in 
onslaught  upon  slavery.  Small  as  was  this  little  band,  and 
hopeless  as  seemed  the  enterprise  to  their  united  strength, 
yet  it  was  disturbed  by  factions,  and  its  efforts  distracted 
and  weakened ;  disagreements  occurred  as  to  the  best  modes 
of  prosecuting  the  object  they  had  at  heart. 

The  question  of  political  action  was  a  fire-brand  in  the 
camp ;  thrown  there  by  the  fearless  hand  of  Mr.  Stewart. 
This  question,  fruitful  of  discord,  was,  whether  this  little 
knot  of  men,  with  voice  so  weak  as  to  be  scarcely  audible 
amidst  the  din  of  contending  political  parties,  should 
attempt  to  stand  up  alone,  and  assert  its  independence  ? 
Was  the  basis  broad  enough  ?  Would  they  not  be  crushed 
between  the  two  great  parties  of  Whigs  and  Democrats,  into 
which  the  nation,  North  and  South,  was  nearly  equally 
divided  ?  With  many,  the  ties  of  party  were  so  old  and 
strong,  and  the  association  so  clear  and  enduring,  that  they 
could  not  be  broken.  Others  believed  that  the  true  policy 


22  ALVAN   STEWART 

was  to  keep  aloof  from  all  party  action  and  association,  and 
so  awaken  opposition  from  neither,  but  woo  the  affections 
of  both.  But  Mr.  Stewart,  early  in  the  history  of  this  move- 
ment, became  convinced  that  the  Anti-Slavery  cause  could 
make  itself  felt,  only  when  its  advocates  should  arise  and 
stand  up  between  the  two  great  political  parties,  distinct 
and  independent,  and  seizing,  with  a  controlling  hand,  the 
balance  of  power,  should  direct  it  to  the  achievement  of  the 
great  object  at  which  they  aimed.  But,  before  putting 
forth  these  views,  he  was  compelled  to  wait  for  the  time  to 
ripen.  When  he  did  advance  them,  he  met  with  opposition, 
even  in  his  own  ranks.  Independent  of  the  world's  antagon- 
ism, he  had  much  to  strive  with  in  his  straggles  for  con- 
science sake.  He  was  the  great  originator  and  champion  of 
the  doctrine  of  political  action.  He  did  not  despair,  but 
continued  to  portray  the  great  good  that  would  result  from 
bringing  the  subject  of  emancipation  into  the  political 
arena. 

Some,  in  the  Anti-Slavery  party,  set  up  a  creed  of  nineteen 
propositions,  and  sought  to  make  a  compliance  with  them 
all  a  test  of  communion.  But  Mr.  Stewart  strenuously 
opposed  this.  He  thought  it  calculated  to  divide,  weaken 
and  destroy. 

" I  believe."  said  he,  "that  we  have  quite  enough,  in  the  enforce- 
ment of  our  one  idea,  to  employ  all  the  moral  and  political  capital  we 
possess — that  those  who  are  anxious  to  consume  time,  in  the  consi- 
deration of  other  topics,  as  a  part  of  the  abolition  crusade,  and  feel 
especially  bound  to  place  free  trade  or  tariff,  as  a  good  or  an  evil  to 
be  obtained  or  rejected,  in  the  same  catalogue  with  the  liberty  or 


AS   AN   ANTT-SLAVEKY   MAN.  23 

slavery  of  three  millions  of  men,  will  do  well  to  secure  another  room 
where  they  can  amuse  those  who  sympathize  with  them,  rather  than 
pain  and  distract  those  who  have  no  taste  for  nineteen  undertakings 
until  they  have  some  evidence  of  their  power  to  accomplish  ONE. 

"  If  you  have  attempted  to  tear  out  one  stump  from  your  field,  by 
your  oxen,  lever  and  screw,  and  could  not  raise  it,  will  you  not  pnt 
on  more  oxen  and  thus  increase  the  power?  Oh,  no,  say  these  gen- 
tlemen, if  you  cannot  uproot  the  stump  with  the  strength  you  pos- 
sess, then,  by  all  means,  hitch  on  to  eighteen  other  great  oak  and 
hemlock  stumps,  at  the  same  time,  and  it  will  be  sure  to  come. 
Apply  your  ciphers  to  this  rule  of  t7iree,  and  let  us  know — if  ten  yoke 
of  oxen  cannot  cause  the  roots  of  this  sturdy  stump  to  forsake  their 
ancient  bed,  how  many  yoke  will  it  require  to  upheave  this  and 
eighteen  others,  at  the  same  time  ? 

"  Men  differ  in  their  belief,  when  they  attempt  to  make  a  creed,  in 
proportion  as  they  multiply  the  number  and  elements  of  discoi'd. 
And  it  has  always  been  found  a  great  achievement  in  a  reformation,  to 
reduce  the  undertaking  to  a  single  object ;  for,  as  subordinate  sub- 
jects are  increased,  the  best  friends  fall  out  by  the  way,  as  to  the 
means  of  prosecuting  the  main  design. 

"  Irish  Emancipation  was  carried  alone,  about  1825,  after  the  labor 
of  a  quarter  of  a  century.  The  English  Eeform  Bill  was  carried  in 
1832-3,  after  the  nation  had  struggled  for  it  for  more  than  a  century. 
West  Indian  Emancipation  triumphed  in  1833,  after  a  terrible  com- 
bat in  the  public  mind.  The  reduction  of  British  postage  was  achieved 
about  1840,  and  the  abolition  of  the  corn  laws  effected  in  1846,  after 
an  unparalleled  commotion.  Now,  had  these  five  questions  been 
yoked  together — embodied  in  a  creed — men  withholding  their  vote 
for  candidates,  unless,  like  a  jury,  they  were  unanimous  upon  all  these 
topics,  all  would  have  failed.  Our  friends  in  England  have  only 
accomplished  these  glorious  objects,  by  doing  one  thing  at  a  time.  It 
is  here,  as  there,  the  only  key  to  success." 

Mr.  Stewart  did  not  believe  it  to  be  the  duty  of  the  citi- 
zens of  the  free  States  to  pursue  and  surrender  fugitive 
slaves.  In  a  letter  relating  to  this  subject,  he  says : 


24:  ALVAN    STEWART 

"  The  jury  trial  law  is  not  repealed ;  and  if  it  were,  I  defy  the 
slaveholder  to  obtain  a  slave  from  central  New  York.  I  defy  him, 
thou  dost  defy  him,  he,  she  or  it  defies  him,  we  defy  him,  ye  or  you 
defy  him,  they  and  all  defy  him.  We  defy  him  in  every  mood  and 
tense  of  the  English  language." 

The  Rev.  John  Pierpont  writes  to  him : 

BOSTON,  MASS.,  24  MarcJi,  1840. 

MY  DEAR  SIB  : 

I  have  long  owed  you  a  letter  of  acknowledgment  and  thanks 
for  your  very  kind,  gratifying,  complimentary,  sympathizing,  amusing, 
honest  and  flattering  letter  of  14th  November  last.  I  did,  when  I 
first  received  it,  as  I  do  now,  most  heartily  thank  you  for  it.  It  was 
so  encouraging— it  expressed  such  a  downright,  hearty  sympathy  in 
my  poor  efforts  and  my  pretty  hard  trials,  that  it  was  like  sunshine 
to  me  after  a  long  northeaster.  Thank  you,  my  dear  sir.  It  was  good 
perse,  and  it  was,  and  is,  especially  good,  considered  in  relation  to  the 
strifes  and  struggles  that  both  the  writer  and  the  written  to  have  to 
pass  through  in  these  stirring  and  sifting  times. 

And  now,  my  dear  sir,  allow  me  to  return  you  my  thanks,  also, 
for  the  speech  you  made  before  the  Young  Men's  Anti-Slavery 
Society,  etc.,  at  Albany,  last  month.  The  first  sentence  in  the  report 
of  that  speech  is  a  volume.  The  events  of  every  day  that  has  passed 
over  us  since  the  moral  reforms — temperance  and  anti-slavery — have 
been  started  in  this  country,  go  to  confirm  not  only  the  truth  of  the 
remark  that  "  a  nation  may  lose  its  liberty  in  a  day,  and  not  miss  it 
in  a  hundred  years" — but  the  application  of  that  truth  to  our  own 
abused  and  blinded  country.  "Was  there  ever  a  country  so  blessed, 
and,  at  the  same  time,  so  cursed,  as  is  ours  ? — so  blessed  of  God — so 
cursed  by  the  avarice  and  servility  of  man?  What  Samsonian 
strength  the  young  giant  must  have  in  his  back  and  muscle,  that  he 
can  stand  up  as  he  does  with  slavery— that  "  old  man  of  the  sea  " — 
upon  his  shoulders,  and  that  he  can  get  along  as  he  does  with  such  a 
sea  of  rum  to  wade  through — and  keep  himself  alive  even,  covered 
over  as  the  poor  fellow  is  with  leeches  of  office  from  the  crown  of  his 
head  to  the  soles  of  his  feet.  My  dear  sir,  can  ho  stand  up  much 


AS   AX   ANTI-SLAVEKY   MAN.  25 

longer,  think  ye  ?  I  do  not  ask  can  he  stand  up  a  free  young  giant 
— that  is  out  of  the  question.  Tree  he  is  not.  Free  he  has  not  been 
for  years.  But  can.  he  stand  at  all,  and  bear  much  longer  the  weight 
of  his  own  chains  ?  From  all  his  curses,  from  rum  and  slavery,  and 
what  is  equivalent  to  both  and  the  cause  and  father  of  both— his  own 
avarice  and  immorality— may  the  Euler  of  the  nations  ere  long  send 
him  a  good  deliverence ! 

I  know,  my  friend,  that  I  need  not  exhort  you  to  go  on  in  the 
course  that  you  have  marked  out  for  yourself.  "Fight  the  good 
fight  of  faith,"  in  your  own  most  'excellent  way.  Give  no  quarter. 
Let  your  good  old  broadsword  split  'em  down  from  chin  to  chine  ; 
spare  'em  not  till  they  cry  for  quarter.  I  suppose  that  then  the 
tenderness  of  your  nature  will  not  allow  you  "thrice  to  slay  the 
slain."  I  thank  the  God  whom  you  serve,  that  you  have  so  much 
of  this  world's  goods  that  the  foes  of  freedom,  of  God,  and  of  cold 
water,  cannot  starve  you  by  thrusting  you  out  of  your  stewardship, 
upon  the  cold  world,  to  dig  or  beg,  as  they  are  trying  to,  me. 

Believe  me  truly, 

Your  friend, 

JNO.  PIEKPOOT. 

Whittier  writes : 

AMKSBURY,  ISfck  \6t  Mo.,  1842. 

MY  DEAR  FRIEND  : 

Thou  hast  doubtless  already  seen  by  the  "  Emancipator  &  Free 
American  "  that  we  have  declared  our  determination  to  secure,  if 
possible,  thy  attendance  at  our  Convention  of  Liberty  at  Boston,  on 
the  16th  of  next  month  ;  and  I  now,  in  behalf  of  the  Liberty  party 
of  Massachusetts,  and  in  accordance  with  my  own  feelings,  earnestly 
invite  thee  to  bo  with  us  on  that  occasion. 

The  legislature  of  the  State  will  be  in  session,  and  our  evening 
meetings  will  be  held  in  the  State  House.  We  must  have  thee  with 
us.  "We  shall  have  a  mighty  gathering  from  all  parts  of  the  State — 
and  wo  want  thy  voice  among  us  uplifted  in  the  name  of  God  and 
humanity.  Do  not  disappoint  us.  Thy  attendance  at  the  "Worcester 
Convention  was  of  immense  service  to  us.  I  do  not  say  this  by  way 
of  flattery ;  all  of  us  know  it  here.  There  is  an  intense  desire  to  hear 
2 


26  ALVAN   STEWART 

thee,  and  thou  wilt  have  such  an  audience  as  could  not  be  gathered 
elsewhere  in  the  Union. 

Please  write  me  a  line  on  receipt  of  this,  informing  me  whether 
thou  shalt  be  able  to  come.  Once  more  let  me  adjure  thee  to  let  no 
small  matter  prevent  thee  from  complying  with  our  request.  In  the 
language  of  Chinese  diplomacy — I  hope  thou  wilt  consider  this—"  a 
special  edict !  and  obey  accordingly." 

With  kind  regards  for  thy  family,  I  am,  as  ever,  thy  friend, 

JOHN  G.  WHITTIER. 

A  correspondent  of  the  "  Press  "  writes  : 

In  an  Anti-Slavery  Convention,  held  at  Port  Byron,  New  York, 
in  1842,  in  the  midst  of  a  speech  of  Mr.  Bradley,  the  door  of  the 
church  in  which  the  convention  was  held  was  opened  noislessly, 
and  there  appeared  the  tall,  straight  figure,  and  pale,  grave  face  of 
the  slave's  friend,  Alvan  Stewart.  The  spontaneous  and  universal 
burst  of  applause,  from  the  entire  audience,  well  indicated  the  im- 
pression left  by  his  eloquence  upon  their  hearts  during  his  visit 
among  us  last  winter.  Upon  being  called  upon,  he  arose  and  made 
one  of  his  best  speeches.  "What  a  wonderful  faculty  he  has  to  hold 
a  subject  up  before  his  audience — what  quaint  sayings  and  un- 
paralled  comparisons !  At  one  instant  his  audience  would  be  roll- 
ing with  laughter,  which  would  soon  give  place  to  sobs  and  grief. 
Never  did  I  witness  a  greater  manifestation  of  his  honest,  holy 
feeling,  than  when  he  alluded  to  his  large  meeting,  at  Fort  Defiance, 
on  the  Maumee,  in  Ohio,  but  a  few  weeks  since,  under  the  "  Old 
Council  Oak."  This  venerable  monarch  of  the  forest  had,  he  said, 
from  time  immemorial,  been  the  shelter  of  the  various  Indian  tribes, 
who  for  centuries  had  met  under  its  spreading  branches,  for  council, 
in  peace  or  war.  While  alluding  to  the  fact  that,  in  that  honored 
place,  the  citizens  of  Fort  Defiance  were  assembled  to  listen  to  his 
stories  of  the  poor  slave's  wrongs,  his  whole  soul  was  stirred  within 
him,  and  a  flow  of  tears  burst  from  his  eyes,  producing  a  correspond- 
ing feeling  throughout  the  audience. 

William  Goodell,  than  whom  no  one  is  more  familiarly 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  27 

acquainted  with  the  progress  of  the  Anti-Slavery  movement, 
writes : 

If  you  will  permit  me,  I  -will  take  the  liberty  to  suggest  two  or 
three  things  wherein  Mr.  Stewart  was  of  most  essential  service  to 
the  cause  of  freedom. 

1.  He  was  the  first  to  insist,  earnestly,  in  our  consultations,  in 
committees  and  elsewhere,  on  the  necessity  of  forming  a  distinct 
political  party  to  promote  the  abolition  of  slavery.     You  will  find 
notice  of  this  on  page  469  of  my  history  of  "Slavery  and  Anti- 
Slavery."    At  this  time,  Mr.  Stewart  stood  alone  on  the  Executive 
Committee  of  the  New  York  State  Anti-Slavery  Society,  at  Utica,  in 
advocating  the  measure.     Gerrit  Smith,  as  president  of  the  society, 
and  member  of  our  Executive  Committee,  was  at  that  time  (Feb., 
1839)   opposed  to  it,  nor  was  I,  myself,  as  one  of  the  committee, 
and  as  editor  of  the  "Friend  of  Man,"  the. society's  organ,  prepared 
to  advocate  the  measure.    President  Beriah  Green  shared  also  in  the 
hesitancy  of  the  rest  of  the  committee.    Myron  Holley,  at  a  convention 
in  September  of  the  same  year,  introduced  a  resolution  and  address 
in  favor  of  a  distinct  party  (Hist.  p.  470)  ;  but  Mr.  Stewart  had  pre- 
viously done  much  to  prepare  abolitionists  for  that  movement.    So 
that  the  Liberty  party,  the  Free-soil  party,  the  Free  Democracy,  and 
the  Republican  party — whatever  may  be  said  of  their  varying  plat- 
forms and  policy — all  owe  their  origin  to  Alvan  Stewart,  in  the 
first  place,  and  to  Myron  Holley  afterward,  more  than  to  any  other 
men.    Mr.  Stewart  presided  at  the  Albany  Convention,  1st  April, 
1840,  at  which  the  Liberty  party  was  organized.     Gerrit  Smith  by 
that  time  had  become  ready  to  cotfperate  in  the  measure. 

2.  Alvan  Stewart  was  the  first  to  elaborate  a  compact  argument 
in  defence  of  the  doctrine  that  the  Federal  Government  had  consti- 
tutional power  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  slave  States.    Though  Mr. 
Stewart  based  his  argument  solely  upon  one  single  clause  of  the 
Constitution  (Amendments,  Art.  V.),  yet  his  argument  was  exten- 
sively regarded  a  triumphant  one,  and  the  debate  it  elicited  among 
abolitionists  gave  rise  to  a  number  of  elaborate  discussions  of  the 
subject  in  pamphlet  form  afterward.    The  great  change  of  senti- 


28  ALVAN    STEWART 

ment  already  perceptible,  and  still  in  progress,  concerning  the  bear- 
ing of  the  federal  Constitution  on  slavery — a  change  destined,  per- 
haps, to  revolutionize  the  national  policy— is  largely  attributable  to 
the  labors  of  Alvan  Stewart  in  1837-8. 

To  you,  sir,  I  may  add  my  conviction,  that,  in  pioneering  these 
two  measures — (1)  a  distinct  political  party ;  (2)  a  national  policy 
directly  and  positively  against  slavery — to  the  extent  of  its  utter 
extirpation,  Mr.  Stewart  has  laid  a  foundation  for  a  reputation  as 
enduring  as  the  cause  of  freedom  in  America.  Whether  his  measures 
are  ever  adopted  or  not,  his  proposal  of  them  belongs  not  less  to  the 
history  of  the  country  than  to  his  own  biography,  and  should  bo 
made  prominent  in  both. 

8.  I  ought  to  add.  that  Alvan  Stewart,  as  chairman  of  the  Execu- 
tive Committee  of  the  New  York  State  *Anti- Slavery  Society,  at 
Utica,  rendered  quite  as  effective  services  in  devising  plans,  ways, 
means  and  appliances,  for  propogating  anti-slavery  sentiments,  and 
initiating  anti-slavery  organizations,  and  rendering  them  effective, 
as  he  ever  did  in  his  public  speeches,  debates,  and  writings.  No  one 
out  of  the  Executive  Committee  could  have  any  adequate  knowledge 
of  his  labors  in  this  department,  nor  due  appreciation  of  their  im- 
portance in  the  promotion  of  our  cause.  In  1836,  he  threw  up  his 
extensive  and  lucrative  law  practice,  to  devote  himself  to  the  one 
great  cause,  of  which  he  regarded  the  then  three  and  a  half  millions 
of  slaves  his  direct  clients,  and  the  entire  American  people,  their 
liberties  and  their  national  prosperity,  as  indirectly,  and  yet  in 
reality  involved. 

Not  all  the  plans  and  projects  of  Mr.  Stewart  were  accepted  and 
adopted  by  the  Executive  Committee.  Perhaps  some  of  them  may 
have  been  chargeable  with  the  "  eccentricity  "  with  which  his  bril- 
liant genius  was  marked.  Not  all  of  them  that  were  adopted 
worked  as  happily  as  might  have  been  desired.  But  enough  of 
them,  either  modified  or  unmodified,  in  committee,  did  so  far  suc- 
ceed, as  to  entitle  him  to  the  credit  I  have  given  him,  and  to  the 
gratitude  of  the  country. 

No  part  of  my  life  do  I  remember  with  more  pleasure  than  my 
social  intercourse  and  public  labors  with  Alvan  Stewart.  Some- 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  29 

times  we  have  earnestly  differed  from  each  other  as  earnest  men 
will,  intent  on  a  common  cause.  But  none  of  those  differences  ever 
lessened  my  esteem  for  him,  and  admiration  of  him. 

Much  as  I  enjoyed,  at  the  time,  those  brilliant  scintillations  of  wit, 
eloquence,  pathos,  humor,  and  eccentric  thought  for  which  he  was 
so  very  remarkable,  and  which  so  enlivened  the  social  conversation 
and  the  public  speeches  of  Mr.  Stewart,  my  memory  is  not  as  reten- 
tive of  them,  in  detail,  as  of  the  more  serious  points  of  argu- 
ment, opinion,  sentiment,  plans  and  measures  which  it  was  my 
privilege  to  discuss  with  him,  in  consultations,  in  committees  and 
otherwise,  for  the  promotion  of  the  objects  we  were  intent  upon 
promoting.  Nor  am  I  as  well  qualified  to  relate,  effectively,  his 
sallies  of  wit  and  humor,  which  I  do  partly  remember,  as  I  ought  to 
be,  to  give  them  their  full  force.  I  will  endeavor,  however,  to 
recall  and  to  sketch  a  very  few  of  them. 

Sometime  in  1836  or  "T,  Mr.  Stewart  earnestly  defended  a  couple 
of  colored  boys,  arrested  at  Utica  as  fugitives  from  slavery  in  Vir- 
ginia. The  boys  in  some  way  got  free,  and  made  good  their  escape 
to  Canada.  Much  excitement  was  occasioned,  and  the  pro-slavery 
presses  of  the  North  exerted  themselves  to  throw  odium  upon  Mr. 
Stewart  for  his  participancy  in  the  affair.  The  southern  papers 
copied  the  inflammatory  statements  and  comments  of  their  northern 
allies,  and  the  name  of  Alvan  Stewart  was  execrated  by  the  slave- 
ocrats  from  Maine  to  Georgia.  In  the  midst  of  all  this,  Mr.  Stewart 
received  a  letter  from  the  old  lady  in  Virginia,  to  whom,  according 
to  the  statutes  of  Virginia,  the  boys  belonged.  She  thanked  Mr. 
Stewart  for  his  kindness  to  her  boys,  who,  she  said,  had  escaped 
from  Virginia,  with  her  approbation.  They  had  been  pursued 
by  her  nephews,  her  presumptive  heirs,  who  were  intending  to 
sell  them  to  the  far  South,  as  soon  as  the  old  lady  should  die.  This 
statement  accorded  precisely  with  the  story  Mr.  Stewart  had 
received  from  the  colored  boys. 

It  was  in  reference  to  the  same  or  a  similar  effort  of  Mr.  Stewart, 
that  he  received  a  letter  of  hearty  commendation  from  another  lady 
in  Virginia,  whose  husband  was  a  slaveholder,  and  a  strong  pro- 
slavery  man.  She  informed  Mr.  Stewart,  that  soon  after  the  recent 
birth  of  her  eldest  son,  she  had  ordered  her  carriage  and  had  driven 


30  ALT  AN   STEWAKT 

a  considerable  distance  with  her  babe,  to  a  neighboring  parish,  and 
had  him  christened  by  the  name  of  Alvan  Stewart,  much  to  the 
astonishment  of  the  parson,  the  audience,  and,  .afterward,  of  her 
husband,  when  he  learned  what  had  been  done !  That  Virginian 
Alvan  Stewart,  if  now  living,  is  nearly  old  enough  to  vote  as  his 
mother  would  doubtless  counsel  him.  In  conventions  Mr.  Stewart 
sometimes  told  the  story  in  answer  to  the  question — "  Why  don't 
you  go  to  the  South  to  preach  your  abolition  ?"  He  thought  he  was 
going  to  the  South,  most  effectually,  by  working  at  home. 

In  Alvan  Stewart's  day,  it  was  thought  a  knock-down  argument 
against  an  Abolitionist  to  ask  whether  he  would  be  willing  to  have  a 
white  man  marry  a  "nigger."  One  day,  in  a  large  convention,  while 
Alvan  Stewart  was  speaking  on  some  resolution,  he  was  interrupted 
by  a  pert  young  gentleman,  neatly  attired,  with  the  stereotyped  ques- 
tion. Mr.  Stewart  replied,  in  a  polite  and  dignified  manner,  explain- 
ing that  Abolitionists  only  asked  that  colored  persons  should  enjoy 
the  protection  of  law  like  other  persons,  and  be  secured  in  the  exer- 
cise of  their  inalienable  rights.  Abolitionists  had  never  set  themselves 
up  to  be  matchmakers,  had  never  undertaken  to  determine  who  peo- 
ple should  marry.  "With  this  explanation  he  attempted  to  resume  the 
thread  of  his  discourse.  But  the  questioner  was  not  satisfied.  He 
repeated  the  question  again,  and,  with  an  air  of  triumph,  demanded 
an  explicit  answer.  Stewart  straightened  himself,  and  stood,  as  in 
an  attitude  of  deliberation.  "Well,"  said  he,  "since  the  gentleman 
is  so  anxious  to  have  the  question  distinctly  answered,  although,  as  I 
have  said,  it  does  not  belong  to  the  Abolition  question,  I  will  frankly 
Btate  my  own  position  on  the  subject.  Let  me  then  say  to  the  gen- 
tleman that  if  he  should  fall  in  love  with  a  colored  girl,  and  should 
find  that  he  could  not  be  happy  without  her,  J  should  interpose  no 
objections  to  the  marriage.'1'1  This  was  said  with  a  sober  and  innocent 
look,  as  if  the  speaker  really  supposed  the  questioner  was  anxious  to 
get  his  consent  to  such  a  connection.  The  house  roared  with  laugh- 
ter, at  the  expense  of  the  pert  young  gentleman,  who  seemed  annihi- 
lated. But  there  Alvan  Stewart  stood,  as  sober  as  a  judge,  without 
relaxing  a  muscle.  After  the  tumult  had  subsided,  he  turned  to  the 
young  man,  with  the  same  innocent,  sober  countenance,  saying:  "Is 
my  young  friend  relieved  of  his  anxiety  ?"  Another  roar,  louder  and 


A8   A1H   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  31 

more  prolonged  than  the  first,  used  tip  what  there  was  left  of  the  in- 
terrogator. 

Alvan  Stewart  was  never  more  in  his  element  than  when,  on  the 
platform  of  a  large  and  enthusiastic  anti-slavery  convention,  he 
pleaded  for  contributions  and  subscriptions  of  funds  for  the  Executive 
Committee,  to  carry  on  the  cause.  This  advocacy  was  always  as- 
signed to  him,  and  he  executed  his  office  in  a  manner  peculiarly  his 
own.  After  stating  the  principles,  measures  and  objects  of  the  So- 
ciety, and  the  uses  it  had  for  funds  to  sustain  lecturers  and  presses, 
and  to  print  and  circulate  tracts,  etc.,  he  would  begin  to  call  for  sub- 
scriptions and  donations  in  a  style  resembling  that  of  an  auctioneer, 
calling  for  bids.  "  Who  will  be  the  first  to  subscribe  $100  ?"  If  a 
lower  sum  was  offered,  he  would  say :  "  Wait,  we  must  have  the 
$100  men  first."  Collectors,  in  the  mean  time,  would  be  passing 
around  the  room  to  take  names  and  moneys.  One  after  another  in 
the  assembly  would  rise  and  announce  their  names  and  the  sums  they 
would  give ;  Alvan  Stewart,  at  the  same  time  continuing  his  appeals, 
interrupted  constantly  by  the  announcement  of  names,  residences, 
and  sums  in  process  of  being  reechoed  on  the  platform,  noted  down 
by  the  secretaries,  and  handed  up,  in  bills  or  pencilled  pledges,  by  the 
receivers.  Alvan  Stewart's  ear  caught  every  name,  and  his  lips 
returned  thanks  to  each  donor  by  name — all  commingling  with  his 
imploring  appeals,  witty  conceits  and  original  remarks.  Such  a  med- 
ley of  pathos  and  puns,  of  demonstration  and  drollery,  mortal  ears 
never  before  heard.  The  attempt,  by  any  other  man,  would  have 
seemed  a  satire — a  broad  farce.  But  in  the  hands  of  Alvan  Stewart, 
all  went  to  make  up  a  symmetrical  whole — sympathy  and  assistance 
for  the  slave.  "  Thank  you,  Mr.  A.,  in  the  name  of  all  that  is  abo- 
minable in  slavery."  "Twenty  dollars  from  Mr.  C."  "Thank  you, 
Mr.  C.,  in  the  name  of  all  that  is  precious  in  humanity."  "  Ten  dol- 
lars from  Mr.  D."  "Thank  you,  Mr.  D.,  in  the  name  of  all  that  is 
sacred  in  holy  justice."  "  Thirty  dollars  from  friends  in  Tonawanda." 
"  Thanks,  kind  friends,  in  the  name  of  all  that  is  dismal  in  the  Tona- 
wanda swamp."  And  so  he  would  go  on,  by  the  half  hour  or  hour. 
Nobody  was  tired.  The  footing  up  of  the  subscriptions  and  the 
counting  of  the  bills  convinced  every  one  that  none  but  Alvan  Stew- 
art could  have  raised  one  half  the  amount.  On  one  occasion  a  liberal 


32  AI.VAN   STEWART 

donation  coming  from  Mr.  Hill — "  The  Lord  bless  Mr.  Hill,"  said 
Stewart,  "  may  he  grow  to  he  a  large  mountain." 

"Abolitionists,"  said  Mr.  Stewart,  "are  the  most  grateful  people 
in  the  world.  They  make  more  account  of  small  favors  than  any 
other  people  living.  They  are  like  country  shopkeepers  who  wind 
up  their  advertisements  with,  '  The  smallest  favors  gratefully  acknow- 
ledged.' "  This  he  said  in  gentle  reproof  of  the  too  easy  credulity  of 
Abolitionists,  in  giving  credit  to  the  half-way  concessions  and  profes- 
sions of  political  men  who  sought  anti-slavery  suffrages  on  the  ground 
of  compliances,  of  little  or  doubtful  practical  value,  and  who  thus 
submitted  to  compromises,  incompatible,  as  he  believed,  with  their 
principles  as  Abolitionists,  and  fatal,  in  the  end,  to  their  success. 
To  some  who  said,  "Half  a  loaf  is  better  than  no  bread,"  he  would 
reply :  "  That  depends  on  whether  you  get  the  half-loaf  or  lose  it,  and 
whether  what  you  do  get  be  wholesome  nutriment  or  poison."  To 
opposers  who  called  Abolitionists  "men  of  one  idea,"  he  would  say, 
it  was  more  creditable  to  have  one  such  idea,  than  to  have  all  the 
ideas  that  ever  floated  upon  the  brain  of  a  pro-slavery  man. 

I  was  riding  with  Stewart,  to  attend  an  anti-slavery  convention.  Our 
road  led  through  a  thriving  village,  in  which  wras  a  large  manufactur- 
ing establishment,  upon  which,  besides  the  principal  sign,  was  the  in- 
scription "Power  to  let,"  meaning  water  or  steam  power.  "Power 
to  let  /"  exclaimed  Stewart ;  "  yes,  Abolitionists  have  got  power  to 
let — surplusage  of  argument  to  spare — motive  power  enough — moral, 
political,  religious,  economical,  and  philanthropic — to  abolish  all  the 
slavery  in  creation,  and  all  the  other  curses  and  abominations  of 
which  the  human  mind  ever  conceived.  Yes,  if  every  planet  in  the 
solar  system  were  inhabited,  and  disgraced  with  slavery ;  if  every  fixed 
star  in  the  firmament  were  the  centre  of  a  planetary  system,  and  every 
planet  thereof  inhabited  with  slaveholders  and  slaves,  Abolitionists 
have  got  motive  power  to  spare  sufficient  to  break  the  fetters  of  every 
slave  in  the  universe.  Yes,  Abolitionists  may  advertiee  '  Power  to 
let  /'  And  yet,"  he  added  after  a  pause,  "  it  remains  to  be  seen  whe- 
ther pro-slavery  priests  and  politicians  haven't  got  stupidity  and  self- 
ishness enough  to  resist  it  all."  In  the  Convention  the  next  day  the 
audience  had  the  benefit  of  the  idea. 

During  the  log-cabin  furore  that  carried  the  election  in  favor  of 


AS   AN    ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  33 

Gen.  Harrison,  Mr.  Stewart  said  he  expected  that  our  next  Presiden- 
tial canvass  would  produce  a  candidate  to  be  supported  on  the  ground 
of  his  not  living  in  any  house  at  all,  but  burrowing,  like  a  wood- 
chuck,  in  a  hole  on  the  hill-side. 

It  is  difficult  to  repeat  effectively  Mr.  Stewart's  peculiar  sayings. 
The  manner,  the  tone,  the  air,  the  expression  of  countenance,  are  all 
w anting.  And  so,  for  the  most  part,  are  the  occasions  and.  the  design 
of  his  saying  them.  In  respect  to  the  publication  of  many  of  them, 
he  might  say  if  Jiving — as  the  clergyman  did  to  a  committee  who 
applied  to  him  for  a  copy,  for  the  press,  of  an  eloquent  sermon  he 
had  just  preached,  during  a  thunder-storm — "If,"  said  he,  "you 
will  agree  to  print  the  thunder  and  lightning  along  with  it,  I  will 
give  you  a  copy." 

Says  Gerrit  Smith,  in  a  letter  of  May  2d,  1857,  to  the 
writer : 

"  Mr.  Stewart  was  emphatically  a  man  of  genius.  I  never  knew 
one  more  so.  He  was  a  man  of  great  thoughts.  I  never  knew  one 
of  greater.  lie  was  a  man,  too,  of  very  tender  heart.  His  pity  for  the 
poor  and  oppressed  was  very  deep.  Above  all  he  was  a  Christian. 

"  I  knew  Mr.  Stewart  well.  We  were  friends  for  many  years.  I 
admired  him  and  loved  him." 

It  may  be  thought  that  Mr.  Stewart  sometimes  dealt  in 
language  too  harsh  and  uncourteous ;  that  he  should  have 
denounced  slavery  in  a  more  delicate  and  silken  phrase. 
But  it  will  be  remembered  in  palliation,  if  palliation  be 
needed,  that  he  was  roughly  used  by  the  advocates  of  the 
system  he  was  opposing;  that  all  the  vituperation  of  our 
vocabulary  was  hurled  against  him ;  the  shafts  of  ridicule, 
the  bolts  of  anger,  the  arrows  of  fierce  denunciation,  all  the 
slanders  that  malice  could  invoke — nay,  that  words  were  not 
the  only  weapons  that  rattled  on  his  shield — that  his  popu- 
2* 


34  ALVAN   STEWART 

larity  was  sapped,  persecution  was  started  on  his  track, 
ostracism  attempted,  and  infuriated  mobs  yelled  around  his 
house.  A  man  under  such  circumstances  may  not  be  held  to 
the  strict  civilities  of  debate.  Strange  would  it  be  if  some 
strong  expressions,  not  domiciled  in  boudoirs,  should  at  times 
escape  him. 

Besides,  it  was  no  poetical  or  dainty  task  he  had  in  hand. 
He  was  not  to  describe  a  landscape  or  paint  a  rose.  He  saw 
this  monster  evil  lifting  high  its  awful  form  and  shadowing 
the  land.  He  felt  it  to  be  his  duty,  however  great  the 
disproportion  in  the  power  of  the  antagonists,  to  fight  to  the 
utmost.  Such  a  conflict  was  one  of  earnestness,  in  which 
there  was  no  time  to  weigh  sentences,  or  balance  courtesies, 
or  bring  forth  his  argument  with  "  By  your  leave."  If  the 
slave  trade  on  the  high  seas  was  justly  denounced  as  a 
"piracy  "  by  the  international  laws  of  Christendom,  justify- 
ing a  yard-arm  punishment ;  if  the  pages  of  our  own  federal 
statutes  confirmed  in  this  respect  the  opinions  of  the  civilized 
world,  he  saw  no  reason  why  the  same  language  was  not 
equally  applicable,  in  principle,  to  the  same  trade  between 
the  States  or  in  the  States.  I  have  not  softened  the  language 
he  has  chosen  in  the  speeches  and  writings  I  have  compiled  ; 
for  it  is  only  by  preserving  his  exact  phraseology  that  a 
just  and  truthful  idea  can  be  obtained  of  the  man  as  he  was. 

That,  in  his  years  of  labor  on  the  questions  of  peace,  of 
temperance  and  slavery,  he  was  impelled  by  the  purest  and 
most  earnest  convictions,  by  the  liveliest  sympathy,  and  by  a 
devout  religion,  those  who  saw  him  daily,  who  heard  his 


A6   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  35 

familiar  conversation  from  morn  till  eve,  who  never  observed 
the  slightest  evidence  of  apathy  or  insincerity,  who  witnessed 
the  heroic  and  concentrated  energy  with  which  he  sacrificed 
health  and  wealth  and  fame  upon  the  altar  of  philan- 
thropy, are  surely  well  qualified  to  judge  and  most  sacredly 
believe. 

The  change  in  the  conduct  of  the  world  toward  him, 
upon  the  announcement  of  his  temperance  and  anti-slavery 
sentiments,  was  marked  and  striking.  Before  that  time  he 
had  been  much  courted,  feted,  admired.  But  such  was  the 
extreme  odium  attached  to  the  causes  his  convictions  com- 
pelled him  to  espouse,  that  even  his  great  general  popularity 
fell  before  it ;  and  he  became  the  target,  for  many  years,  for 
all  the  poisoned  arrows  of  intemperance  and  slavery.  And  it 
was  in  sustaining  himself  under  this  great  reverse  of  public 
sentiment  toward  him,  and,  for  many  years,  to  the  day  of  his 
death,  breasting  the  tide  of  public  ridicule,  vituperation, 
and,  in  many  instances,  malignity,  and  perseveringly,  labori- 
ously, doing  what  he  thought  to  be  his  duty  with  unflinching 
firmness  and  untiring  energy,  that  his  character  stands  out  in 
boldest  relief,  and  limns  itself  upon  the  canvas  in  colors 
most  enduring. 

One  of  the  greetings  which  have  come  to  me  during  my 
work  will,  I  am  sure,  be  gladly  read  by  those  who  remember 
how  the  writer  of  it — Theodore  D.  Weld — held  increasing 
audiences  at  fever  pitch,  with  his  flashing  eye,  his  clarion 
tones  and  marvellous  eloquence,  without  manuscript  or  note, 
for  sixteen  successive  evenings,  in  the  very  church  from 


36  ALVAN   STEWART 

which  the  Anti-Slavery  Convention  had   been,  but  a  few 
months  before,  forcibly  expelled. 

"Eight  heartily  glad  am  I,"  says  Mr.  Weld,  "that  a  memoir  of 
Alvan  Stewart  is  to  be  published,  and  that  you  are  to  write  it.  Tho 
world  would  be  cheated  out  of  its  own,  if  the  good  and  great  in  Alvan 
Stewart  were  to  be' left  in  the  custody  of  tradition,  subject  to  all  its 
distortions  and  dilutions.  .  .  . 

"  I  never  saw  him  in  private  life,  except  once  at  his  own  table,  a 
part  of  an  evening,  at  his  house  when  it  was  full  of  company  ;  and 
now  and  then  as  we  shook  hands,  and  spoke  a  word  of  cheer  to  each 
other,  in  our  hurryings  tip  and  down,  driving  the  brunt  of  the  anti- 
slavery  conflict. 

"Personally  I  knew  him  less  than  I  knew  any  other  of  tho  most 
prominent  anti-slavery  men  of  New  York  city,  and  State.  Yet  I 
knew  enough  of  him  to  impress  me  profoundly  with  the  conviction 
of  his  rare  powers,  exhaustless  versatility ;  that  marvel  of  humor, 
ever  fresh,  ever  at  flood  tide,  and  ever  his  own— those  batteries  of 
wit,  irony  and  sarcasm  always  in  play,  every  shot  telling,  and  never 
leaving  one  the  less  in  the  locker — that  power  with  the  '  reductio  ad 
dbsurdum"1  in  argument,  in  which  he  had  no  peer;  but  better  far 
than  all,  that  depth  of  pathos,  those  outwelling  sympathies,  never 
at  ebb :  that  ever  yearning  heart-ache  for  the  wronged,  that  moral 
courage  that  always  dared  yet  never  knew  it  dared  ;  all  these,  with  a 
kindred  host  come  thronging  around  me  at  the  thought  of  Alvtm 
Stewart.  Blessings  on  his  memory.  His  works  do  follow  him." 

And  when  Mr.  Stewart  was  removed,  by  death,  from  his 
labors  in  this  cause,  the  following  evidence  of  the  estimation 
in  which  he  was  held,  by  the  friends  of  reform,  appeared  as 
his  obituary : 

It  is  with  pain  that  we  learn  that  Alvan  Stewart  is  no  more 
among  the  living  throng  of  mankind.  His  death  took  place  in  New 
York  city,  May  1,  1849,  at  his  home  with  his  family  in  the  59th  year 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  37 

of  his  age.    This  is  an  event  we  have  been  contemplating  for  months, 
and  always  contemplated  it  with  feelings  of  sadness. 

Mr.  Stewart  was  a  native  of  New  York,  and  though  of  respectable 
family,  emphatically  the  artificer  of  his  own  fortune.  He  com- 
menced his  professional  life  at  Cherry  Valley,  Otsego  county,  where 
he  acquired  eminence  as  a  lawyer,  and  for  several  years  had  a  large 
lucrative  practice.  In  1832  Mr.  Stewart  made  this  city  (Utica)  his 
home,  and  until  falling  health  demanded  a  change  of  climate. 

Alvan  Stewart  was  a  man — an  original  man — copying  nobody, 
imitating  nobody,  and  inimitable  in  himself,  both  as  to  genius,  modes 
of  expression  and  the  character  of  his  mind  and  manners.  He  was 
well  read,  and  had  a  mind  well  stored  with  varied  learning ;  but 
his  borrowed  thoughts  and  vast  information  derived  from  books, 
received  by  passing  through  his  mind  and  finding  utterance  through 
his  peculiar  genius,  an  originality  and  freshness  which  added  to  their 
power.  But  it  was  not  merely  books  or  stereotyped  ideas  that  dis- 
tinguished Mr.  Stewart  and  elevated  him  to  a  post  in  society,  and 
gave  him  an  honorable  name  among  the  distinguished  men  of  the 
age.  It  was  his  originality  as  a  thinker  and  actor,  and  his  indepen- 
dent self-directed  course  on  the  questions  of  the  times  in  which  he 
lived.  As  a  man  of  humor  and  wit,  mingled  with  gravity  and  pro- 
found good  sense,  he  stood  forth  as  peculiar  to  his  day  and  age. 
These  gave  him  a  power  at  the  bar  and  force  as  an  orator.  But  it  is 
of  Alvan  Stewart  as  a  philanthropist  we  desire  to  speak. 

Perhaps  no  living  man  in  America,  certainly  no  one  in  the  State 
of  New  York,  has  done  more  signal  service  for  the  cause  of  human 
freedom  than  Alvan  Stewart ;  and  it  is  almost  equally  true  of  the 
Temperance  Reform.  Mr.  Stewart  was  among  the  earliest,  and  cer- 
tainly among  the  ablest  supporters  of  the  temperance  cause.  He 
espoused  these  enterprises  when  it  cost  something  to  make  the  sacri- 
fice. With  no  earthly  or  time-serving  motive  to  gratify — while  to 
"  entirely  refrain  "  from  the  agitation  of  unpopular  subjects  would 
have  saved  him  from  a  world  of  odium  and  malignant  misrepresen- 
tation— he  obeyed  the  convictions  of  his  inner  man,  threw  himself 
into  the  breach,  giving  to  persecuted  reform  the  support  of  his  supe- 
rior talent  and  personal  influence.  His  name  became  synonymous 
with  "abolition,"  and  "  teetotalism,"  at  a  time  when  men's  souls 


38  ALVAN    STEWAKT 

were  tried.  Nor  did  he  shrink  from  the  worst  opprobrium  which 
such  an  identification  of  himself  with  reform,  brought  on  his  head ; 
but  the  power  of  his  conviction  of  the  truth  and  uprightness  of  his 
cause  enabled  him  rather  to  prefer  the  bad  opinion  of  the  world  to 
the  applause  of  a  time-serving  age.  It  is  not  strange  that  those  who 
can  see  no  virtue  in  efforts  to  relieve  mankind  of  the  untold  evils  of 
drunkenness — to  upturn  and  overthrow  the  despotism  of  American 
slavery— should  be  at  a  loss  to  estimate  Mr.  Stewart's  motives ;  nor 
is  it  strange,  that,  when  he  in  his  zealous  support  of  the  truth  should 
rebuke  religious  and  political  delinquency  and  frustrate  the  designs  of 
the  politicians,  on  his  head  should  fall  vile  slander,  and  that  he  should 
be  pointed  out  as  a  fanatic.  Those  who  have  sought  to  convict  the 
leaders  of  the  abolitionists  of  being  ambitious  have  had  the  most 
hopeless  cause  ever  brought  before  the  bar  of  public  opinion.  Alvan 
Stewart  was  a  lawyer  of  the  first  class.  His  talent,  varied  and 
extensive  information,  education  and  wealth,  naturally  placed  him 
in  the  upper  circle  of  society  ;  and  for  him  to  descend  from  motives 
of  ambition  to  take  the  drunkard  by  the  hand  and  recognize  the 
despised  African  as  a  man  and  a  brother,  would  have  been  a  freak 
in  human  character  unaccounted  for  in  the  philosophy  of  human 
nature.  The  truth  was,  Mr.  Stewart  was  highly  conscientious,  and 
gave  to  reform,  his  thoughts,  his  time  and  his  money,  from  a  sincere 
love  of  it,  and  lived  and  labored  to  better  mankind,  trusting  to  the 
future  to  vindicate  his  name,  and  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth  to  mete  to 
him  his  reward.  For  some  five  years  we  were  privileged  with  an 
intimacy  and  constant  intercourse  with  Mr.  Stewart,  and  we  know 
that  with  him  the  religious  sentiment  was  predominant  and  that  a 
clear  conviction  of  duty  governed  his  actions.  That  he  was  not 
without  faults,  we  are  duly  sensible  ;  but  his  imperfections  were  not 
of  a  character  to  seriously  detract  from  a  life  devoted  to  the  good  of 
his  race,  and  of  signal  service  to  mankind.  He  gave  himself  heartily 
to  the  cause  of  reform,  and  that  too  When  reform,  feeble  and 
neglected,  most  needed  his  wise  counsels  and  strong  and  vigorous 
support.  From  the  moment  of  his  consecration,  his  devotion  was 
untiring  and  unremitted,  until  reluctantly  forced  from  active  service 
by  disease  and  a  broken  constitution.  In  his  retirement,  his  reflec- 
tions were  those  of  a  good  man  in  view  of  duties  done  and  responsi- 


AS   AN   ANTI-SLAVERY   MAN.  39 

bilities  honorably  met,  and  the  faitli  which  bringeth  salvation  was 
his  stay  and  support  in  his  failing  years.  Alvan  Stewart  has  lived 
to  some  purpose.  The  world  has  been  made  better  by  his  living  in 
it,  and  the  example  of  his  life  will  shed  blessings  on  ages  to  come. 
If  a  slave  now  lifts  to  heaven  his  manacled  limbs,  or  a  drunkard 
reels  through  the  streets,  neither  that  slave  nor  that  drunkard  can 
reproach  Alvan  Stewart,  for  duties  left  undone  in  his  behalf.  To 
them  he  gave  the  better  portion  of  his  life — to  their  deliverance  he 
consecrated  his  powerful  mind  and  the  best  portion  of  his  days — and 
the  blessings  of  the  poor  and  oppressed  will  rest  on  his  name.  "We 
mourn  the  death  of  Mr.  Stewart  and  sympathize  in  the  sorrowful 
feelings  the  news  of  his  death  will  impart.  To  us  he  was  a  friend, 
forbearing  and  sympathizing.  To  us  he  was  a  counsellor  whose 
advice  was  imparted  with  almost  parental  tenderness.  His  friend- 
ship we  shall  ever  hold  in  grateful  remembrance,  and  we  hope  to 
profit  by  the  lessons  of  wisdom  which  have  fallen  from  his  lips. 


THE  SCOPE  OF  THIS  BOOK. 

LETTER  OF  ALVAN   STEWART   TO   THE  LIBERTY  PARTY,  1846. 

LET  us  move,  in  the  solid  column,  upon  the  ranks  of 
slavery  !  Let  us  lock  our  arms,  by  the  power  of  united  poli- 
tical action.  Let  every  man's  name  be  enrolled  who  has 
fired  the  bullet  of  his  ballot  against  slavery.  Let  every  name 
be  registered  by  the  middle  of  September.  Sixty-five  thou- 
sand .  men  were  found  on  the  Ides  of  November,  1844, 
inscribed  on  the  muster  roll  of  human  freedom. 

THE   ARMY    OF   LIBERATION. 

You  are  the  moral  army  of  liberation.  It  is  not  an  enlist- 
ment for  one  year,  but  during  the  war.  This  army,  with  its 
additions,  fights  for  glory  in  its  most  exalted  sense.  To 
deliver  three  millions  of  slaves  to  self-ownership,  and  give 
them  the  right  to  do  everything  which  is  not  wrong,  are  the 
pass-words  of  the  army  of  deliverance.  The  army  of  libera- 
tion will  remove  the  fetters  from  mind  and  body  of  enslaver 
and  enslaved  of  fifteen  States,  and  double  the  agricultural  an'd 
treble  the  manufacturing  and  mechanical  products.  Another 
part  of  their  mission  is  to  establish  36,000  common  schools, 
those  nurseries  of  truth  and  knowledge,  the  elements  of  self- 
government,  in  those  fifteen  States.  This  army  of  liberation 
will  carry  500  printing  presses,  and  one  million  of  Bibles, 
and  20,000  school-masters  and  mistresses,  as  free-will  offer- 
ing, in  the  day  of  a  most  glorious  emancipation,  to  these 
States.  This  army  is  charged  with  the  high  duty  of  blotting 
out  Mason  &  Dixon's  linev  the  line  of  eternal  discord.  This 


THE   SCOPE   OF   THIS   BOOK.  41 

army  is  to  collect  the  bowie-knives  and  revolving,  hair- 
triggered  pistols  of  these  States,  and  place  them  in  the 
bottom  of  the  fathomless  sea.  This  army  is  to  make  labor 
honorable  in  these  fifteen  States.  This  army  is  to  remove 
all  northern  jealousies,  and  unite  North  and  South,  East 
and  West,  in  eternal  bonds  of  fraternity.  This  aimy  is 
charged  with  the  modification  of  southern  and  northern 
opinions  as  to  the  constitutional  powers  of  the  Federal 
Government,  on  the  subject  of  tariffs  for  revenue  or  tariffs 
for  protection,  or  free  trade,  and  direct  taxation,  believing 
the  extremes,  left  and  right,  will  see  eye  to  eye,  and  will 
walk  hand  in  hand  when  a  common  interest  controls,  and 
common  instrumentalities  are  employed  to  obtain  subsistence. 
This  army  is  also  charged  with  the  purification  and  exalta- 
tion of  American  character,  by  creating  a  bond  of  union 
between  the  abstractions  of  human  freedom  and  the  living 
practicalities — by  bridging  that  hitherto  yawning  gulf;  and 
this  army  is  charged  with  the  utter  extirpation  of  that  deso- 
lating hypocrisy,  which  so  long,  in  Church  and  State, 
destroyed  the  use  of  language,  in  suffering  a  holy  abstrac- 
tion, in  religion  or  politics  standing  as  our  creed,  to  be  a 
license  practically,  to  act  out  all  manner  of  abominations ; 
the  purity  of  the  creed  making  atonement  for  the  profligacy 
of  the  conduct  under  it.  This  army  of  freedom  is  charged 
with  rescuing  the  character  of  this  great  nation  from  the 
burning  sneers  and  unanswerable  sarcasms  of  old  Europe, 
which  declared  that  as  hope  for  man  ascended  high,  reality 
dug  dungeons  deep  and  low  in  which  to  hide  our  shame. 

THE   DECLARATION    OF    INDEPENDENCE. 

This  army  is  charged  with  the  faithful  execution  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence;  the  great  unperformed,  the 


4:2  ALT  AN   STEWART. 

greatly  admired,  but  unavailable.  For  seventy  years  the 
nation  has  been  so  overwhelmed  with  the  truthfulness  and 
grandeur  of  its  conceptions,  that  they  have  been  content  to 
stand  all  of  this  time  and  shout  their  admiration  before  an 
astonished  world,  and  annually  arrest  the  very  wheels  of 
human  affairs,  while  on  the  4th  of  July,  we  stretched  the 
utmost  power  of  human  genius  for  the  strongest  conceptions 
of  intellect,  and  for  the  most  consuming  thoughts,  to  be 
delivered  in  the  most  beautiful  robes  of  language,  to  stamp 
that  impression  of  veneration  on  the  mind  of  others  as  deeply 
as  it  had  sunk  in  our  own. 

THE   SHIP    OP    STATE. 

We  stand  looking  at  this  splendid  ship  of  state,  yet  on 
the  stocks,  her  masts  raised,  yards  trimmed,  canvas  spread, 
and  ballast  in,  and  provisioned  for  a  circumnavigation  of  the 
whole  circle  of  human  necessities,  with  orders  to  call  at 
every  port,  island  and  country  in  her  course  ;  carrying  jus- 
tice, law,  equal  rights  to  all  men,  furnishing  them  with  a 
remedy  for  the  wrongs  inflicted  for  ages,  possessing  the  sure 
and  certain  power  of  striking  fetters  and  bonds  from  the  legs 
and  arms  of  men,  with  the  power  of  opening  prison  doors 
and  of  placing  the  victims  on  the  great  platform  of  equal 
and  eternal  rights,  and  giving  them  power  to  make  the  laws 
they  are  required  to  honor,  and  in  future,  the  obligations 
they  are  bound  to  obey. 

The  Liberty  party  is  charged  with  the  high  duty  of 
launching  and  navigating  the  old  ship  of  American  Inde- 
pendence, which  has  stood  ready  for  a  launch  from  the  4th 
of  July,  1 776,  while  the  seas  have  swarmed  with  pirates  and 
buccaniers,  who  have  even  come  upon  her  deck  and  sworn 
by  her  stripes  and  colors,  that  she  never  shall  be  launched 
as  long  as  wood  grows  and  water  runs.  These  pirates  and 


THE   SCOPE   OF   THIS   BOOK.  43 

freebooters  have  sucked  the  free  blood  of  the  nation  from 
its  veins,  and  now  threaten  the  lives  of  those  who  may 
endeavor  to  launch  this  ship,  and  declare  that  she  was  never 
made  to  go  to  sea;  she  was  only  made  to  stand  eternally  on  the 
stocks  as  an  object  of  unexplainable  admiration,  as  an 
abstract  ship,  to  be  deified  on  the  stocks  on  the  fourth  of 
July,  and  point  the  orations  of  Juniors  and  Sophomores,  at 
a  college  commencement ;  and  in  fact,  they  say,  if  you  do 
launch  her,  they  will  bore  holes  in  her  bottom  and  sink  her 
and  all  her  glorious  freight,  as  she  was  meant  to  be  a  ship  only 
on  land  and  not  on  the  water ;  and  these  pirates  are  ready  to 
prove  that  one  of  the  old  ship  carpenters  who  built  her  at 
Philadelphia,  was  heard  by  one  of  the  pirates  to  say,  that 
the  ship  was  not  made  to  go  on  the  water,  but  was  intended 
solely  for  the  land.  And  many  say,  who  are  not  pirates, 
that  we  must  search  for  the  intention  of  the  old  ship-builders 
and  hands  who  framed  and  made  this  ship ;  if  some  of  them 
did  say  it  was  their  intention  that  this  ship  should  sail  on  the 
land,  then  we,  their  posterity,  are  bound  to  sail  on  the  land, 
though  the  ship  itself  would  contradict  it,  even  if  every 
builder  should  swear  that  the  land  was  her  destined  ele- 
ment. 

Will  the  army  of  liberation  put  themselves  in  position  to 
launch  this  ship,  and  go  on  board  of  her  as  her  navigators  ? 

POLITICAL    PARTIES. 

There  have  stood  two  great  parties  at  the  North,  who 
have  often  pretended  they  were  willing  to  launch  the  ship, 
but  the  pirates  and  buccaniers  made  such  an  outcry  about 
the  story  of  one  of  their  number  having  heard  one  of  the  old 
carpenters  of  Philadelphia  say,  that  she  was  made  to  sail  on 
the  land,  they  have  not  dared  to  do  it.  These  two  parties  at 
the  North  have  been  so  anxious  to  carry  out  the  intention 


44  ALVAN    STEWAET. 

of  the  FRAMERS  that  they  have  waited  seventy  years  for  the 
pirates  to  bring  forward  their  proof  that  such  was  the  original 
understanding ;  the  pirates  have  made  arguments  through 
several  thousand  days,  while  their  witness  was  coming,  who 
never  came,  trying  to  prove  by  arguments  most  profound, 
that  it  could  never  have  been  the  intention  of  sailing  the  ship 
except  upon  the  land ;  for,  say  th.ey,  sailing  upon  the  sea, 
would  be  at  war  with  our  piratical  business  on  the  sea,  which 
is  older  than  the  framing  of  the  ship,  and  was  in  existence  on 
the  4th  of  July,  1776  ;  therefore  the  ship  must  be  intended 
to  sail  on  the  land,  or  stand  upon  the  stocks.  The  northern 
two  great  parties  have  been  overwhelmed  with  the  good 
sense  as  well  as  absoluteness  of  this  prodigious  argument, 
and  have  been  staggered,  for  seventy  years,  by  its  weight,  and 
have  not  yet  made  up  their  mind  as  to  the  character  of  the 
reply,  or  even  of  its  possibility.  The  argument  is  so  consuming, 
and  wherewithal  so  reasonable,  they  fear  it  is  unanswerable. 

THE   REVOLUTION   SUCCESSFUL  THROUGH   THE  PRINCIPLES 
OF   THE   DECLARATION. 

Now  the  Liberty  party  Abolitionists  hold  the  Declaration 
of  Independence  to  be  an  elementary  law,  the  law  of  laws, 
the  rock  of  first  principles,  to  which  the  nation  descended, 
and  on  which  it  built  in  the  honest  hour  of  its  agony  ;  and 
that  every  other  institution  or  constitution  contravening  its 
great  essentials  is  null  and  void ;  for  without  that  declaration 
asserting  that  "  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,"  our 
independence  could  not  have  been  achieved,  and  but  for  that 
we  should  this  hour  have  been  revolving,  as  colonial  satellites, 
around  the  Sea-girt  Isle.  Had  our  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence contained  what  many  say  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  does,  a  proposition  to  support  slavery  (which 


THE   SCOPE   OF   THIS   BOOK.  45 

I  deny),  and  had  the  great  Declaration  contained,  what  I 
admit  is  found  in  the  Constitution  and  laws  of  several  States 
in  the  South,  to  wit,  slavery,  or  had  the  great  Declaration 
contained  the  converse  of  its  own  mighty  proposition,  and 
asserted  that  some  men  were  created  to  be  free  and  some 
were  created  to  be  slaves,  then  the  battles  of  Trenton,  Sara- 
toga and  Yorktown  had  never  been  fought ;  the  British 
"Court  Gazette"  would  on  the  1st  of  January,  1777,  have  pub- 
lished an  obituary  of  our  Revolution,  in  these  words  :  "  Order 
reigns  in  the  Colonies.  Trans-Atlantic  freemen  refused  to 
pour  out  their  blood  to  sustain  the  abhorred  proposition  that 
some  men  were  created  to  be  slaves."  To  attempt  to  in- 
graft slavery  into  our  system,  is  a  direct  fraud  upon  every 
drop  of  blood  spilled  in  the  Revolution,  every  sacrifice  en- 
dured, every  doUar  spent,  or  misery  suffered. 

THE  ABJECT   NORTH. 

The  North  has  been  periodically  humbled,  kicked  and 
trampled  under  foot,  by  the  South.  The  just  punishment  of 
heaven  has  been  poured  upon  the  North,  for  fortifying  and 
propping  slavery.  The  North  in  Church  and  State,  has 
emasculated  the  Christian  religion,  and  constitutional  law,  to 
uphold  slavery.  The  North,  for  its  tameness,  and  hunting  up 
arguments  to  quiet  slaveholding  consciences,  and  basely  mak- 
ing briefs  to  aid  slaveholding  lawyers  to  undermine  justice 
and  overthrow  liberty,  is  treated  with  a  supercilious  con- 
tempt, by  the  South,  the  real  wages  of  meanness.  In  Con- 
.  gress,  the  northern  man  does  not  rise  to  the  position  of  a 
privileged  serf.  This  is  just ;  that  men  who  go  round  the 
country  soliciting  posts  in  Congress  and  on  the  bench  of  the 
Supreme  Court^  of  the  United  States,  foreign  Ambassador- 
ships, and  seats  hi  Presidential  cabinets,  should  be  obliged 
to  earn  their  positions  by  crushing  slaves  and  slandering 


46  ALVAN   STEWART. 

the  Declaration  of  Independence,  and  the  venerable  dead 
who  fought  for  its  adoption  ;  also  by  sneering  at  men  who 
contend  for  freedom,  justice  and  law,  misnaming  them  fana- 
tics and  enthusiasts.  The  South  have  inflicted  on  the  grov- 
elling North  pains  and  penalties,  as  the  instruments  of  hea- 
ven's vengeance.  Yes,  tenfold  more  of  real  judgments,  than 
everything  done,  thought,  or  attempted,  by  England,  which 
lit  the  torch  of  the  Revolutionary  war. 

The  slaveholders  are  tantalized,  by  the  sight  of  the  pro- 
sperity of  free  labor.  20,000  voting  slaveholders  regard  the 
free  North  and  its  institutions  with  malevolence  and  hatred, 
and  God,  for  just  and  holy  reasons,  has  used  those  slave- 
holders as  a  whip  of  scorpions,  to  punish  the  base  bowing 
North,  in  property,  character  and  life,  by  war,  taxation, 
and  debasing  humility,  as  a  just  retribution  for  upholding 
slavery  and  slaveholders ;  and  for  having  forsaken  the  Scrip- 
tures of  truth,  and  having  perverted,  by  base  interpretation, 
the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  from  its  high  freedom- 
protecting  sense  to  a  low  and  degrading  piratical  covenant, 
to  be  employed  for  the  destruction  of  human  rights,  rather 
than  their  support.  The  North  bowed  in  the  college,  pulpit 
and  Congress,  to  the  dominion  of  the  man-stealer,  and  em- 
ployed its  brains  in  the  destruction  of  human  liberty,  by  a 
servile  yielding,  to  slaveholding  construction  of  religion  and 
law.  The  southern  slaveholding  merchants  sought  and  ob- 
tained credit  in  the  North,  and  $500,000,000  would  not  meet 
the  losses  of  the  North,  in  sixty  years  which  were  cancelled 
by  southern  bankruptcy.  Thus  the  North  was  justly,  and  in 
part,  made  slaves  to  work  for  the  South,  as  a  just  punishment 
on  us,  who  would  not  see  injustice  in  the  position  of  the 
slave.  The  slaveholders  envied  us,  and  hypocritically  became 
the  advocates  of  the  rights  of  impressed  seamen  ;  yes,  men 
whose  own  fields  were  worked  by  impressed  and  stolen 
black  men. 


THE   SCOPE   OF   THIS   BOOK.  47 


THE   WAR   OF    1812. 

The  war  of  1812  the  South  decreed,  and  137  millions  were 
wasted  by  government  in  its  prosecution,  and  200  millions 
more  were  lost  on  the  sea  and  land,  by  our  merchants  and 
farmers.  The  South  placed  Major  General  Smyth,  at  Buf- 
falo, a  slaveholding  lawyer  of  Virginia ;  Major  General  Win- 
der, a  slaveholding  lawyer  of  Maryland,  at  Forty  Mile  Creek, 
on  the  side  of  Lake  Ontario ;  Major  General  Wilkinson,  a 
Louisiana  slaveholder,  at  the  Cedars  and  Rapids  of  the 
St.  Lawrence ;  and  Major  General  Wade  Hampton,  the  great 
sugar-boiler  of  Louisiana,  and  the  largest  slaveholder  hi  the 
United  States  (having  over  5000  crushed  human  beings 
bowing  to  this  tyrant),  was  located  at  Burlington,  Vermont : 
four  slaveholding  generals,  with  their  four  armies,  were 
stretched  out  on  our  northern  frontier,  not  to  take  Canada, 
but  to  prevent  its  being  taken,  by  the  men  of  New  England 
and  New  York,  in  1812,  '13  and  '14;  lest  we  should  make 
some  six  or  eight  free  States  from  Canada,  if  conquered. 
This  was  treason  against  northern  interests,  northern  blood, 
and  northern  honor.  But  the  South  furnished  the  officers, 
the  President  and  the  cabinet.  This  revelation  could  have 
been  proved  by  General  John  Armstrong,  then  Secretary  of 
War,  after  he  and  Mr.  Madison  quarrelled.  But  these  slave- 
holders could  add  Louisiana,  Florida,  Texas,  and  perhaps 
half  of  Mexico,  at  the  expense  and  disgrace  of  the  nation,  to 
extend  the  area  of  slavery ;  and  the  North  with  two  votes 
to  the  South  one,  professing  to  be  opposed,  yield  at  last  to 
the  wish  of  this  unprincipled  greediness  and  inordinate  rob- 
bery. Forty  millions  are  paid  to  establish  slavery  in  Florida 
and  murder  the  Indians.  How  many  hundred  millions  have 
the  North  lost,  after  erecting  the  most  expensive  manufac- 
tories, and  filling  them  with  machinery  to  have  them  all 


48  ALVAN    STEWART. 

brought  to  nothing  by  a  prostration  of  the  tariff,  as  at  this 
time,  in  order  to  ruin  the  North,  without  benefiting  the 
South !  But  will  the  North  still  present  her  back  for  the  rod, 
will  she  still  vote  for  a  slaveholder  as  President  of  the  United 
States  ?  The  North  can  never  deliver  herself  and  the  nation 
from  this  thralldom,  until  a  majority  declare  they  will  vote  for 
those  men  only,  who,  if  elected,  will  do  all  in  their  power  for 
the  constitutional  abolition  of  slavery. 

THE   KECOIL    OF    SLAVERY.  , 

If  this  nation  had  never  undertaken  to  hold  up  the  hands 
of  the  slaveholder  and  crush  the  colored  man,  there  would 
have  been  djpuble  the  amount  of  wealth  there  now  is  in  the 
United  States.  All  of  the  disgraceful  wars  and  the  three 
hundred  millions  of  expense  thereby,  would  have  been  saved, 
and  one  thousand  millions  lost  by  southern  bankruptcy  and 
change  of  northern  pursuits,  lifting  up  and  dashing  to  the 
ground  tariffs  for  revenue  and  protection,  and  that  everlasting 
whirl  of  inconstancy,  breaking  up  the  sober  and  adjusted 
calculations  of  men,  by  throwing  interests  most  momentous 
against  the  rocks,  leaving  nothing  but  ingenuity  to  collect  the 
fragments  and  form  another  nucleus,  and  as  it  grew  to 
importance,  malevolence  would  again  undermine  it,  and  the 
barbarity  of  slavery  raze  it  to  the  ground.  But  for  slavery 
we  should  have  ascended  the  Mount  of  Civilization,  to  a 
point  never  before  attained;  the  land  would  have  been 
filled,  even  through  the  present  regions  of  guilt,  pauperism 
and  destruction  in  the  South,  by  industrious,  prosperous  and 
cultivated  dwellers  of  the  land,  rejoicing  under  their  own 
vines  and  the  results  of  economical  industry,  the  social  system 
advancing,  minds  refined,  education  universal,  with  peace  in 
all  our  borders.  In  making  the  slave  suffer,  how  we  have 
been  punished  therefor  ! 


THE   SCOPE   OF  THIS   BOOK.  49 


ONE  IDEA. 

Since  things  are  so,  let  the  Liberty  party  take  possession 
of  the  ship,  launch  it,  and  put  out  to  sea,  as  soon  as  their 
strength  will  permit.  Let  the  Liberty  party  be  united. 
The  great  one  idea,  that  a  man  is  a  man,  the  world  over,  and 
is  entitled  to  freedom,  and  that  slavery  is  a  sin  against  God 
and  a  crime  against  man  everywhere,  and  that  it  is  your  duty 
to  vote,  and  you  will  only  vote  for  those  who  will  do  all  in 
their  poSver  to  crush  the  crime  of  slavery,  is  that  on  which 
you  must  and  will  succeed.  There  never  was  a  great  one 
idea,  founded  in  eternal  truth  and  the  nature  of  things,  which 
did  not  succeed ;  and  there  never  will  be,  as .  long  as  the 
promises  of  eternal  truth  stand  good. 


ALYAN  STEWART'S  FIRST  PUBLISHED  SPEECH 

AGAINST   SLAVERY, 
A  QUARTER    OF    A    CENTURY   AGO,    1835. 

ALVAN  STEWART,  Esq.,  of  Utica,  rose  and  said,  ihat  with 
the  consent  of  the  Convention,  he  would  trespass  a  few 
minutes  on  the  time  of  this  numerous  and  honorable  body. 

He  said  this  was  the  first  Convention  which  had  ever 
assembled  in  the  United  States  under  such  a  remarkable 
state  of  facts  as  now  existed,  and  which  seem  to  distinguish 
this  from  all  public  bodies  of  men  who  have  ever  met  in  this 
land  before.  For  the  last  forty  days,  at  least  three  hundred 
of  the  public  presses  have  daily  poured  a  continual  shower 
of  abuse  upon  the  callers  and  the  call  for  this  Convention, 
characterized  by  a  spirit  of  vengeance  and  violence,  knowing 
and  proposing  nothing  but  the  bitterness  of  invective,  and 
the  cruelty  of  bloody  persecution.  Our  enemies  have  sent 
their  slanders  against  us,  whispering  across  the  diameter  of 
the  globe,  telling  the  haughty  and  sneering  minions  of 
Absolutism,  OH  the  other  side  of  the  world,  that  the  sons  of 
the  Pilgrims  had  proved  recreant  to  their  lofty  lineage, 
unfaithful  to  their  high  destiny,  untrue  to  the  last  hopes  of 
man. 

Said  Mr.  S.,  Is  it  true  that  the  philanthropy  which  warms 
our  hearts  into  action,  for  the  suffering  slave,  can  exile  our 
patriotism,  and  prepare  our  souls  for  the  most  heaven-daring 
guilt  ?  Is  it  true,  because  we  feel  for  bleeding  humanity, 
that  it  makes  us  cruel  ?  Can  pity  produce  it  ?  Can  love 
beget  hate  ?  Can  an  affectionate  respect  and  kind  feeling 


HIS   FIRST   PUBLISHED   SPEECH   AGAINST    SLAVERY.        51 

for  all  tbe  human  beings  whom  Providence  has  cast  in  these 
twenty-four  States,  be  evidence  that  we  wish  to  cut  the 
throats  of  two  millions  and  a  half  of  our  white  neighbors, 
friends,  brethren  and  countrymen  ?  Does  a  generous  regard 
for  the  inj  ured  slave  imply  hatred  for  the  master  ?  If  so, 
the  converse  of  the  proposition  must  be  true,  that  to  love 
the  master  implies  hatred  to  the  slave.  Neither  proposition 
is  true  ;  yet  the  enemies  of  this  Convention  have  acted 
toward  us  as  though  these  propositions  had  the  assurance  of 
certainty,  as  we  have  on  a  clear  day  at  twelve  o'clock  at 
noon  that  the  sun  shines  on  the  world. 

MISREPRESENTATIONS. 

"We  have  been  proclaimed  traitors  to  our  own  dear  native 
land,  because  we  love  its  inhabitants.  Our  humanity  is  treason, 
our  philanthropy  is  incendiarism,  our  pity  for  the  convulsive 
yearnings  of  down-trodden  man  is  fanaticism.  Our  treason 
is  the  treason  of  Franklin  and  Jay  ;  our  incendiarism  is  that 
of  Clarkson  and  Wilberforce  ;  our  fanaticism  is  the  fanaticism 
of  Earl  Grey  and  Lord  Brougham,  and  the  majority  of  the 
wisest  heads  in  proud  Old  England  ;  our  sentiments  are  those 
expressed  by  William  Wirt,  Patrick  Henry,  and  Thomas 
Jefferson. 

Our  creed  is  to  be  found  in  the  two  great  witnesses  of 
God's  revealed  will  to  man — the  Old  and  New  Testaments. 
The  Declaration  of  Independence,  the  Constitutions  of  our 
country,  and  the  laws  passed  under  them,  we  make  the  rule 
of  our  conduct,  in  imparting  our  sentiments  to  others  on  the 
subject  of  slavery. 

The  enemies  of  our  noble  sentiments  and  elevated  inten- 
tions, have  resorted  to  the  old  beaten  track  of  misrepresenta- 
tion, and  by  adding  to  our  code  views  never  promulgated,  by 
charging  us  with  intentions  never  harbored,  with  expectations 


52  ALVAN   STEWART. 

never  cherished,  and  as  remote  from  the  mind  of  an  abolitionist 
as  infidelity  is  from  the  conscience  of  piety,  as  meanness  is 
from  generosity,  as  bigotry  is  from  charity,  as  truth  from 
falsehood,  as  freedom  from  slavery,  they  would  fain  make  us 
unfit  for  this  world. 

We  are  not  judged  by  evidence,  by  our  own  declarations,  by 
either  what  we  have  said  or  done,  but  by  acts  which  our  wily 
adversaries  prophesy  we  will  do,  or  commit,  in  some  future 
period  of  time ;  and  thus  they  lift  the  curtain  which  shuts  from  all 
mortal  eyes  (but  prophets')  the  great  unbounded  future,  and 
by  looking  down  the  vale  of  time,  they  behold  us  engaged  in 
the  diabolical  and  blood-thirsty  work  of  getting  laws  passed 
to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  the  slave 
Territories,  and  in  this  way  knocking  the  fetters  from  the 
bondman,  which  our  adversaries  call  treason  calculated  to 
dissolve  the  Union. 

UNIONISTS. 

What  Union  ?  I  doubt  not  you  may  see  some  of  these 
Union  patriots  here  to-day,  who  would  take  your  life  and 
mine,  and  that  of  every  member  of  this  Convention,  and  in  so 
doing  think  they  had  done  their  master  a  service,  and  lift  up 
their  hands  for  eternal  and  unmitigated  slavery  to  every 
colored  man,  woman  and  child  in  the  United  States,  and 
throw  into  the  same  pile  all  who  differed  with  them  in 
sentiment,  to  promote  the  interest  of  their  master.  These 
are  the  patriotic  Unionists,  who  secretly  wish  to  dissolve  the 
Union,  by  letting  the  great  cancer  grow  on  the  neck  of  the 
Union,  without  attempting  its  cure  or  removal.  These  are 
the  friends  of  the  Union,  who  are  willing  to  see  2,500,000 
men,  women  and  children  sacrificed  to  the  demon  of 
Slavery.  Those  Unionists  are  willing  to  destroy  you 
and  me,  Mr.  Chairman,  because  we  are  not  terrified  at  the 


HIS   FIRST   PUBLISHED   SPEECH   AGAINST   SLAVERY.         53 

roaring  of  the  slaveholders,  and  because  we  feel  for  two 
millions  and  a  half  of  men,  women  and  children  who  are  now 
being  offered  at  the  shrine  of  cruelty,  lust  and  avarice. 
These  lovers  of  the  Union  refuse  to  hear  the  loud  lamenta- 
tions of  bitter  sorrow  and  hopeless  grief,  which,  like  the 
voice  of  a  mighty  flood,  ascend  day  and  night  from  every 
plantation,  every  factory,  every  corn-field,  every  rice-field, 
every  tobacco-field,  every  cotton-field,  and  every  kitchen  of 
eleven  States,  and  penetrate  the  ear  of  God. 

Mr.  S.  said,  The  slaves  never  held  a  convention  on  the 
subject  of  their  wrongs ;  they  never  met  to  petition  for  a 
redress  of  grievances,  or  remonstrate  against  the  manifold 
injuries  by  which  they  are  broken  down.  No !  their  petition 
was  never  read  within  the  walls  of  legislation!  Solemn 
thought  even  to  us,  who  for  a  moment  have  become  his 
mouthpiece,  to  tell  his  wrongs  to  the  world,  and  demand 
redress.  "We,  even  we,  white-skinned  Republicans,  appear  to 
be  on  the  eve  of  losing  our  rights  as  white  men,  for  having, 
from  the  deepest  impulses  of  humanity,  become  the  slave's 
organ,  to  explain  to  an  unfeeling  world  the  wrongs  inflicted 
upon  him.  If  white  men  in  non-slaveholding  States,  encounter 
so  much  noisy  violence  and  injury,  in  barely  pleading  the  cause 
of  the  slave  before  those  who  have  no  interest  in  the  slave's 
body,  and  whose  only  interest  is  to  cringe  and  flatter  the 
master  of  the  slave,  what  must  be  the  condition  of  the  poor 
slave,  left  to  plead  his  own  cause  against  his  own  master — 
that  master  who  is  fed  sumptuously  every  day,  and  clothed 
in  purple  and  fine  linen  by  the  unpaid  labor  of  the  slave  f 
When  will  the  glutton,  the  wine-bibber,  the  adulterous,  the 
avaricious,  and  the  cruel,  listen  to  the  voice  of  the  unaided 
slave  ?  But  some  say,  "  The  slaves  can  be  set  free  twenty 
or  thirty  years  hence."  Ah !  will  men  have  less  wants  then  ? 
more  justice  and  humanity  then  than  now  ?  No.  Again, 
if  it  is  right  to  liberate  slaves  fifty  years  hence,  the  right  is 


54:  ALVAN    STEWART. 

the  same  now,  for  there  will  be  human  beings  in  the  world 
then,  who  will  claim  the  slaves  by  a  long  line  of  descent, 
who  will  have  as  many  wants  to  supply  with  slave  labor  as 
men  have  now.  The  sun  will  shine  as  hot,  the  rice-lands 
will  be  as  unhealthy  as  now. 

ABSTRACT   SLAVERY. 

But  we  are  told  by  eur  enemies  they  love  the  slaves  as 
well  as  we  do  ;  and  then,  with  the  next  word,  insult  and 
abuse  us  for  telling  the  world  his  wrongs,  or  attempting  any 
redress.  Mr.  S.  said  he  confessed  that  this  was  a  new  mode 
of  manifesting  an  equality  of  love.  But  perhaps  we  do  not 
understand  our  opponents ;  they  may  mean  that  they  hate 
slavery  in  the  abstract,  but  love  it  in  detail.  Or  perhaps 
they  mean  that  they  hate  the  abstract  slavery  and  mean  to 
destroy  abstract  slavery,  by  hating  all  white  men  who  are  in 
favor  of  its  abolition.  Perhaps  they  hate  slavery  in  the 
abstract,  but  love  the  man  who  causes  it  in  detail  so  well, 
that  abstract  hatred  for  one  purpose  is  pure  love  for  another. 
A  man  might  as  well  say  that,  abstractly,  he  hated  murder, 
adultery,  swearing  and  stealing,  but  that  he  loved  the  mur- 
derer, adulterer,  swearer  and  thief.  Away  with  northern 
Jesuitism,  which  is  opposed  to  abstract  slavery,  but  in  favor 
of  its  continuance,  and  ready  to  kill  any  one  who  wishes  to 
change  the  present  posture  of  slavery,  as  it  practically  exists. 
Oh,  shame !  hast  thou  not  a  new  blush  for  such  conscience- 
ruining  sophistry  ? 

The  same  ingenious  and  fatal  distinction  has  been  taken  by 
the  wretched  metaphysicians,  who  were  willing  to  barter  Ameri- 
can liberty  to  get  gold  and  power,  on  the  subject  of  free  dis- 
cussion the  summer  past. 

Anti-abolitionists  at  the  North  say  they  believe  in  free  dis- 
cussion in  the  abstract,  and  will  not  allow  it  to  be  drawn  in 


HIS   FIKST   PUBLISHED   SPEECH   AGAINST   SLAVERY.        55' 

question.  But  this  means,  as  Ave  find  it  interpreted  and 
translated  in  the  Dictionary  of  Daily  Experience,  that  each 
man  may  discuss  slavery,  or  anything  else,  in  the  silent 
chamber  of  his  own  heart,  but  must  not  discuss  it  in  public, 
as  it  may  then  provoke  a  syllogism  of  feathers,  or  a  deduction 
of  tar.  An  abolitionist  may  have  the  abstract  right  of  dis- 
cussion, but  it  must  be  disconnected  with  tune  and  place ; — 
if  a  majority  of  his  neighbors  differ  with  him,  there  is  no 
place  where,  or  time  when,  he  may  discuss.  This  abstract 
discussion  requires  an  abstract  place  and  abstract  tune  ;  the 
abstract  place  must  mean  the  solitude  of  the  wilderness,  or 
loneliness  of  the  ocean ;  and  the  abstract  time  must  mean 
some  portion  of  the  past  or  future,  as  it  is  never  the  present. 
The  liberty  of  an  abolition  press  is  to  be  silent ;  the  liberty 
of  conscience  for  an  Abolitionist  is  to  think  to  himself;  or  else 
to  think  like  his  slavery-loving  neighbor,  or  stop  thinking. 

DISSOLUTION    OF   THE   UNION. 

The  threat  of  dissolving  the  Union  is  the  universal  medicine 
for  every  political  difficulty  at  the  South.  One  day  Georgia 
threatens  the  dissolution,  on  account  of  her  Indian  territory, 
gold  mines,  and  State  jurisdiction,  and  the  missionaries ;  then 
again  the  poor  Union  was  to  be  dissolved  by  the  post-office 
robbing  State  of  South  Carolina,  to  vindicate  the  beauties 
of  nullification. 

Then  again,  this  Union  was  to  have  been  dissolved  in 
1828,  1830,  1831,  1832,  at  four  distinct  periods  within  a 
short  space,  because  the  tariff  laws  were  not  made  to  suit 
certain  slave  States ;  but  the  noble  Union  held  together ; 
we  did  not  hear  of  a  single  rafter  or  brace  flinching,  in  1835. 
The  Union  is  to  be  again  dissolved  and  charged  in  account 
current  to  abolition.  The  joke  of  it  all  .is,  that  northern  men 
profess  to  be  frightened  to  death  every  time  a  negro-driver 


56  ALVAN   BTEWART. 

cries  "  dissolve  the  Union — dissolve  the  Union?"1  As  well 
might  a  man  who  lived  in  a  powder-house,  every  time  he 
became  angry  call  for  firebrands ! 

Let  southern  men  dissolve  this  Union  if  they  dare  ;  slavery 
would  then  take  care  of  itself,  and  its  masters  too  ; — in  one 
little  month  both  would  become  extinct.  No  !  oh,  deceived 
northerner !  the  southern  man  will  be  the  last  to  dissolve  this 
Union  ;  by  it  he  expects  to  enjoy  his  slaves,  without  it  he 
cannot,  one  day.  But  the  wily  politician  of  the  South  has 
discovered  the  ghost  that  never  fails  to  frighten  the  North, 
and  the  North  has  been  kept  in  a  political  sweat  for  the  last 
ten  or  twelve  years,  for  fear  the  men,  who  could  not  exist  as 
slaveholders  without  this  Union,  would  dissolve  it. 

It  seems  dissolution  is  threatened  by  the  South,  unless 
thirteen  free  States  disfigure  and  disgrace  their  statute 
books  with  bloody  laws  to  protect  slavery,  forbidding  Aboli- 
tionists to  speak,  write  or  publish  anything  against  slavery, 
or  petition  for  its  abolition  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  under 
heavy  penalties ;  the  despotism  of  which  laws  would  so  far 
exceed  any  in  Russia  or  Turkey,  that  Nicholas,  and  the 
Grand  Seignior,  would  recoil  with  instinctive  abhorrence, 
from,  so  foul  an  insult  to  our  common  humanity.  So  it  is  not 
enough  that  eleven  States  must  bend  their  backs  under  the 
shameful  load  of  slavery,  with  statute  books  blushing  for  the 
wrongs  done  by  man  to  man,  which  all  the  unfathomed 
waters  of  the  great  deep  could  not  wash  away ;  but  the 
tongues  of  northern  men,  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  must 
cleave  to  the  roofs  of  their  mouths,  and  the  indicting  hand 
be  palsied  in  giving  the  world  a  history  of  the  negro's  woes. 

MY  COUNTRYMEN,  YE  SONS  OF  THE  PILGRIMS,  THE  TYRANT  IS 
AT  YOUR  DOORS,  LIBERTY  IS  BLEEDING,  LIBERTY  IS  DYING, 

slavery  has  robbed  you  of  the  liberty  of  discussion,  of  con- 
science and  the  press.  Armed  mobs  are  to  do  the  work 
of  the  slaveholder,  till  the  legislature  obeys  his  mandate. 


HIS   FIRST   PUBLISHED   SPEECH   AGAINST   SLAVERY.        57 

Then  read  from  your  own  statute  books  your  doom  ;  you 
are  a  slave  without  his  privilege !  Had  the  six  hundred 
delegates,  freemen,  now  before  me,  been  deterred  from  meet- 
ing this  day,  from  fear,  IT  WOULD  HAVE  BEEN  WORSE  THAN  IN 
VAIN,  THAT  A  WARREN  FELL,  A  MONTGOMERY  BLED,  AND  A 
LAWRENCE  EXPIRED. 

You,  for  this  moment,  are  the  representatives  of  American 
liberty ;  if  you  are  driven  from  this  sacred  temple  dedicated 
to  God,  by  an  infuriated  mob,  then,  my  brethren,  wherever 
you  go,  liberty  will  go  ;  where  you  abide,  liberty  will  abide ; 
when  you  are  speechless,  LIBERTY  is  DEAD. 


3* 


RESPONSE  TO  THE  MESSAGE  OF  GOY.  MARCY, 

FEBRUARY,   1836. 

I  VENTURE  to  introduce  to  your  consideration  a  rather 
surly  child  of  mine,  which  I  intend  to  send  to  Governor 
Marcy  to  nurse.  A.  S. 

To  WILLIAM  L.  MARCY,  ESQ., 

Governor  of  the  State  of  New  York : 

"What  you  have  written  for  the  public  eye  in  your  late 
message  on  the  subject  of  abolition,  will  be  answered.  The 
state  of  mind  under  which  you  labored,  in  this  part  of  your 
message,  it  is  to  be  hoped  is  rather  its  official  state  than  its 
private  and  individual.  For  it  is  hardly  to  be  believed  that 
an  individual,  moving  under  such  a  weight  of  error  and  sus- 
taining such  a  burden,  would  be  equal  to  the  discharge  of 
the  common  duties  of  life,  where  truth  and  tranquillity 
of  mind  are  so  often  required.  But  how  much  error,  preju- 
dice and  misrepresentation  you  are  enabled  to  carry  before 
an  abused  public,  it  shall,  in  part,  be  the  business  of  this 
communication  to  show.  Your  duty,  as  far  as  the  Constitu- 
tion may  be  your  rule,  is  to  communicate  to  the  legislature, 
the  condition  of  the  State,  and  recommend  such  matters  as 
you  deem  expedient. 

The  Constitution  contemplates  that  you  should  submit 
facts  to  the  legislature,  or  your  conclusion  from  them.  You 
write  like  most  men  who  have  a  given  conclusion  prepared 
before  they  know  the  facts  from  which  it  should  come,  or 
without  regard  to  fact.  No  matter,  with  this  class  of  writers, 
what  may  be  the  distance  between  fact  and  assertion,  for 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCT.      59 

they  appeal  to  their  imagination  for  their  facts,  and  to  their 
prejudices  for  their  conclusion.  You  seem  not  to  be  aware 
that  you  were  bom  and  live  in  an  abolition  age ;  that' 
in  the  last  30  years  more  has  been  done  for  the  abolition 
of  slavery  than  before,  in  the  long  and  eventful  existence 
of  this  world.  But  one  would  suppose,  from  your  message, 
some  new  combination  in  crime,  some  hideous  monster  had 
arisen,  so  wonderful  in  its  character,  so  powerful  in  its  opera- 
tions, that  it  will  require  in  its  extermination  the  loss  of  the 
liberty  of  the  press,  of  conscience,  discussion,  and  of  the 
inviolability  of  the  mail.  One  darling  object  of  the  abolition 
part  of  your  message  is,  to  create  a  body  of  public  odium 
against  a  portion  of  your  fellow  citizens,  and  from  your  offi- 
cial height  to  hurl  the  missiles  of  insult  and  abuse,  till  your 
virulence  ceased  from  the  labor  more  tired  than  satisfied. 

THE    CRIME    OF    ABOLITIONISTS. 

You  have  charged  your  felloAV  citizens  with  high  crimes 
and  misdemeanors  ;  crimes  which  have  made  the  gibbet  their 
homes,  the  guillotine  their  companion,  the  gallows  their 
elevation. 

The  crime  of  these  abolitionists,  as  you  know,  in  its  length 
and  breadth,  height  and  depth,  is  a  belief  that  slavery  is 
wrong,  and  ought  immediately  to  come  to  an  end,  and  that 
they  take  the  liberty  of  telling  the  wrorld  so ;  and  endeavor 
to  make  others  think  like  themselves.  You  know,  as  dis- 
connected with  the  present  Presidential  question,  that  every 
ninety-nine  men  out  of  one  hundred,  at  the  North,  if  put  on 
their  oaths,  would  swear  that  they  considered  slavery  a 
wrong  or  a  sin,  and  that  they  believed  it  ought  immediately 
to  terminate. 

This  is  the  feeling  of  thirteen  of  the  twenty-four  States  and 
is  the  essence  of  abolition.  There  are  a  few  aristocrats  at  the 


60  ALVAN   STEWART. 

North,  whose  consciences  are  unaffected  by  the  unspeakable 
wrongs  done  the  slave,  who  would,  with  yourself  and  Gov- 
ernor McDuffie,  agree  that  domestic  slavery  is  the  true  foun- 
dation of  the  social  edifice.  As  much  as  you  may  affect  to  be 
surprised  to  find  your  sentiments  so  fully  known,  it  will  be 
proved  from  your  late  message  before  this  communication  is 
finished.  If  ever  a  society  should  be  formed  in  South  Caro- 
lina or  Louisiana  to  perpetuate  slavery,  you  may  expect,  at 
their  first  meeting,  a  resolution  will  be  passed  conferring  on 
you  an  honorary  membership  in  the  most  flattering  language. 
I  believe  it  would  pain  you  from  your  inmost  soul  if  you 
believed  the  efforts  of  the  Abolitionists  should  be  rewarded, 
in  the  next  five  years,  with  universal  emancipation. 

VOICE    OP   THE   FATHERS. 

You  profess  with  many  of  the  slaveholders  to  admire 
Thomas  Jefferson  as  a  sort  of  Moses  who  led  the  people  of 
this  land  out  of  the  wilderness  ;  he  said  he  trembled  for  his 
country,  when  he  remembered  that  God  was  just,  and  in  a 
servile  war  that  no  attribute  of  the  Almighty  could  be  found 
to  aid  the  white  man.  In  sentiment,  Thomas  Jefferson  was 
an  Abolitionist. 

Patrick  Henry,  Luther  Martin,  and  William  "Wirt  were 
believers  in  abolition  doctrines  and  proclaimed  them  to  the 
world.  Such  men  could  not  exist  with  their  sentiments  sup- 
pressed, where  the  happiness  of  millions  was  concerned. 
The  late  John  Jay,  one  of  the  triumvirate  of  the  Federalist, 
and  governor  of  this  State,  was  an  Abolitionist,  in  the  largest 
sense  of  the  word.  Benjamin  Franklin,  not  unknown  to  fame, 
was  an  Abolitionist.  The  men  who  composed  the  first  Con- 
gress which  ever  met,  in  1774,  recommended  that  the  slave- 
trade  should  cease  in  the  December  after ;  were  not  these 
men  Abolitionists  ? 


RESPONSE  TO  THE  MESSAGE  OF  GOVERNOR  MARCT.     61 

ENGLAND'S  GLOEY 

Clarkson,  Wilberforce,  Huskinson,  Canning,  Lord  Broug- 
ham, O'Connell,  and  Earl  Grey  were  Abolitionists;  those 
intellectual  giants  who  led  glorious  England,  at  the  cost  of 
one  million  dollars,  to  destroy  slavery  in  her  dominions  ;  yes, 
the  year  1833  shows  you  England  expending  by  a  single  act 
of  legislation,  in  behalf  of  suffering  humanity,  more  than  all 
the  other  legislatures  in  the  world  have  done.  England, 
proud  and  noble  old  England,  on  whose  dominions  the  sun 
never  sets,  whose  rule  one  hundred  and  fifty  millions  obey, 
one-fifth  of  the  human  race,  is  a  mighty  nation  of  Abolition- 
ists ;  and  if  every  page  of  the  works  of  England's  great  dead 
were  torn  from  the  libraries  of  the  world,  and  every  monu- 
ment of  her  glory  in  arts  and  arms  forever  destroyed,  save, 
oh!  save  her  the  act  of  legislation  of  1833,  by  which  820,000 
slaves  were  emancipated  at  the  cost  of  $100,000,000. 
She  would  then  Stand  alone  in  that  sun  of  glory  which  would 
never  set. 

"Were  Jefferson,  Henry,  Martin,  "Wirt,  Jay,  Franklin, 
Clarkson,  Wilberforce,  Huskinson,  Canning,  Brougham,  Grey, 
O'Connell,  and  England's  millions,  all  fanatics,  and  reckless 
incendiaries  ?  For  these  English  Abolitionists  are  as  much 
like  American,  as  truth  is  verity. 


THE    ABOLITION   AGE. 

But,  sir,  I  will  give  you  more  abolition,  and  show  you  that 
you  are  so  far  behind,  as  to  be  out  of  sight  of  the  march  of 
events,  if  you  do  not  discover  this  to  be  the  abolition  age  ; 
and  if  there  is  one  thing  more  than  any  other,  on  which  the 
Americans  and  Europe,  with  the  different  governments  of 
which  they  are  made  up,  have  acted  in  the  last  twenty  years 


62  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

in  harmony,  it  has  been  in  the  abolition  of  slavery  and  in  ex- 
pressing the  universal  abhorrence  of  the  trade.  Bonaparte, 
in  1815,  on  his  return  from  Elba,  declared  himself  an  Abolition- 
ist, and  by  decree  forbid  Frenchmen  being  engaged  in  the 
slave  trade. 

In  1817,  Louis  XVIII.  became  an  Abolitionist  and  ratified 
the  act  of  Bonaparte.  Spain,  in  December,  1817,  declared 
the  slave  trade  should  cease  after  May,  1820  ;  and  thus  Fer- 
dinand VII.  became  affected  with  abolitionism.  Portugal,  in 
1818,  abolished  this  trade  north  of  the  Equator. 

Holland,  Prussia,  Denmark,  and  Russia,  expressed  their 
abhorrence  about  the  same  time.  These  several  decrees  of 
abolition  by  the  several  countries  of  Europe,  were  hastened, 
and  probably  accomplished,  in  obedience  to  a  general  reso- 
lution, passed  by  the  holy  alliance,  which  Congress  of  Sove- 
reigns met  at  Vienna  in  1815,  and  from  the  irrepressible  feel- 
ings of  common  humanity,  and  with  a  view  to  the  drawing 
an  odious  comparison  between  their  monarchical  sentiments, 
without  negro  slavery,  and  our  republican  government  with 
it,  declared  that  the  voice  of  the  civilized  world  demanded 
the  universal  abolition  of  African  slavery,  in  all  its  connec- 
tions with  that  ill-fated  continent. 

Abolition  has  an  abiding  home,  from  the  pillars  of  Hercules 
to  the  regions  of  eternal  ice  :  in  the  nobleman's  bosom,  in  the 
palace  of  kings,  in  the  Congress  of  sovereigns.  The  empire 
of  Mexico,  with  as  many  slaves  of  negro  and  Indian  as  this 
nation  contains,  abolished  slavery,  in  the  last  twenty  years  ; 
this  is  an  empire  of  Abolitionists.  Hay  ti  is  a  volcano  of  aboli- 
tionism, warning  the  world,  when  men  have  come  from 
slavery  to  freedom,  to  never  attempt  their  reduction  a  second 
time.  What  are  all  those  mighty  republics  on  both  sides  of 
the  Andes  and  Equator  but  empires  of  pure  abolitionism  ? 
Brazil,  it  is  believed,  stands  alone,  in  the  crime  of  slavery ; 
excepting  which,  through  the  vast  plains  of  the  tropics,  no 


RESPONSE  TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR  MARCY.      63 

s^ve  is  seen  working  in  the  light  of  the  sun,  where  nature, 
attired  in  her  grandest  costume,  looks  down  from  Chimbo- 
razo,  the  throne  of  her  majesty,  while  the  voice  of  liberty 
commanded  the  slaves  of  mammon's  slaves  to  come  from  the 
bowels  of  the  mountains,  the  deep  mines  of  the  earth,  from 
misery's  home,  from  three  hundred  years  of  bondage,  to 
equality,  liberty  and  law.  These,  also,  are  the  empires  of 
abolitionism.  The  Abolitionists  of  the  United  States  have,  in 
the  Empire  of  Mexico,  South  America,  Hayti,  and  the  coun- 
tries of  Europe,  which  in  the  last  thirty  years  have  manifested 
their  disposition  to  be  Abolitionists,  no  less  than  two  hundred 
and  fifty  millions,  or  one-third  of  the  human  family,  being  the 
whole  of  the  civilized  and  Christianized  world,  except  a  part 
of  my  own  dishonored  and  disgraced  country.  But  this  is 
not  all  the  capital  with  which  we,  insulted  Abolitionists,  have 
to  set  up  business.  We  think  we  have  a  large  amount 
of  abolition  stock  garnered  up  in  the  hearts  of  thirteen  free 
States  of  this  republic ;  yes,  we  believe  we  have  magazines 
of  this  explosive  substance,  in  the  sad  regions  of  slavery,  trea- 
sured in  the  trembling  hearts  of  Christian  masters,  who 
remember  that  God  is  just.  We  have  five  hundred  abolition 
societies,  one  hundred  and  fifty  of  which  have  been  added 
since  the  outrage  of  Utica.  This  is  abolitionism  dwindling ! 
so  you  try  to  deceive  the  South  till  after  the  ides  of  Decem- 
ber, 1836.  The  voice  of  these  five  hundred  societies  will 
ring  in  your  ear  and  the  slaveholder's  till  there  is  not  a  slave 
in  America.  It  is  the  voice  of  Mexico,  the  voice  of  South 
America,  the  voice  of  Hayti,  the  voice  of  all  Europe,  the  voice 
of  the  age,  the  voice  of  the  world,  the  voice  of  Almighty 
God. 

Yet,  sir,  you  have  had  the  weakness  to  echo  back  the 
tyrant's  yell,  and  call  that  voice  when  it  has  been  sounded 
by  your  constituents,  the  voice  of  recklesness,  the  voice  of 
fanaticism,  the  voice  of  the  incendiary.  We  find  you  medi- 


64  ALVAN   STEWART. 

tating  a  stab  at  the  Constitution  you  have  sworn  to  protect. 
We  find  you  telling  the  legislature  in  that  message,  that  you 
have  no  doubt  they  possess  that,  attribute  of  State  sove- 
reignty, which  has  the  power  to  silence  this  voice  of  abolition- 
ism forever. 

SURRENDERED   POWERS. 

You  say,  with  great  cunning  in  your  logic,  that  the  legisla- 
ture must  possess  it,  because  this  State  has  not  surrendered 
the  power  to  the  General  Government.  A  strange  argument 
to  fall  from  the  lips  or  pen  of  a  man  bred  a  lawyer,  once  a 
judge  and  now  a  governor.  Upon  that  principle  the  legisla- 
ture might  appoint  a  king  to  rule  the  State  of  New  York ; 
because  the  people  of  the  State  never  delegated  the  power 
to  the  General  Government  of  making  a  king,  therefore  it 
must  be  reserved  to  the  legislature,  who,  if  they  have  not 
power  to  make  a  king,  it  would  prove  the  State  was  not  a 
sovereign  and  independent  State,  and  was  destitute  of  the 
attributes  of  sovereignty.  The  people  of  this  State  have 
never  surrendered  the  trial  by  jury  to  the  control  of  the 
General  Government,  therefore,  according  to  your  reasoning, 
the  legislature  have  a  right  to  abolish  it  in  all  cases.  For  if 
they  could  not  abolish  it,  there  would  be  a  want  of  sove- 
reignty. The  right  to  take  private  property  for  public  pur- 
poses, without  compensation,  has  never  been  surrendered  to 
the  General  Government,  therefore  the  legislature  of  this 
State  have  the  right.  If  the  Roman  Catholic  religion  should 
be  found  disagreeable  to  the  eleven  slave  States,  and  they 
should  make  a  great  outcry  against  their  ceremonies  and 
ritual,  and  threaten  to  split  the  Union,  unless  the  State  of 
New  York  passed  laws  to  banish  or  punish  with  death,  all 
professors  of  the  Roman  faith,  you  would  say  with  the  same 
propriety  you  have  now  done  in  relation  to  the  abolitionists, 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCT.       65 

that  this  State  had  never  delegated  to  the  General  Govern- 
ment the  power  of  suppressing  or  regulating  religion,  there- 
fore the  legislature  has  the  power  of  abolishing  the  Roman 
Catholic  religion,  with  a  penalty  of  death  for  disobedience  ; 
for  if  the  legislature  has  not  this  power,  the  State  lacks  an 
attribute  of  sovereignty,  which  cannot  be,  when  that  attri- 
bute is  necessary  for  preserving  peace  with  our  neighbors. 

Into  such  unfathomable  depths  of  absurdity  your  zeal  to 
serve  the  slaveholder  has  precipitated  you.  You  forgot  the 
very  Constitution  from  which  you  derived  your  authority  to 
make  your  message.  You  forgot  that,  whether  powers  are 
delegated  to  the  General  Government  or  not,  we  have  a  Con- 
stitution restraining  you,  the  judiciary  and  the  legislature, 
from  the  exercise  of  certain  powers  forbidden  to  be  used 
under  any  circumstances  whatever. 

There  is  a  class  of  rights  of  the  most  personal  and  sacred 
character  to  the  citizen,  which  are  a  portion  of.  individual 
sovereignty,  never  surrendered  by  the  citizen,  in  coming  into 
the  compact  of  civil  society,  either  to  the  State  or  General 
Government,  and  the  constitutions  of  the  States  and  Union 
have  told  the  world,  after  enumerating  them,  that  there  is  a 
class  of  unsurrendered  rights,  which  the  citizen  refused,  in 
making  the  compact,  to  throw  into  the  mass  or  common 
stock  of  surrendered  rights  for  legislative  discretion ;  and 
the  legislatures  of  the  States  and  Union  are  forbidden  by  the 
constitutions  of  the  States  and  Union  from  touching  those 
unsurrendered  rights ;  no  matter  in  what  distress  or  exigency 
a  State  may  find  itself,  the  legislature  can  never  touch  those 
unsurrendered  rights  as  objects  of  legislation.  We  may  sup- 
pose the  citizens  of  this  State  saying  at  the  time  the  Consti- 
tution was  formed,  as  we  learn  from  the  Constitution  itself, 
"  we  will  not  submit  all  the  rights  we  possess  in  a  state  of 
nature  to  the  discussion  of  legislative  action ;  they  are  too 
sacred,  too  liable  to  abuse,  they  are  a  part  of  our  personal 


66  ALVAN  STEWART. 

sovereignty,  which  we  will  never  submit  to  the  will  of 
another,  and  we  here  mark  these  personal  reserved  rights 
of  individual  sovereignty  in  the  constitution  of  the  State  of 
New  York.  *  ' 

"  We  will  never  surrender  the  free  exercise  and  enjoyment 
of  religious  profession  and  worship ;  without  discrimination 
and  preference,  it  shall  be  allowed  in  this  State  to  all  man- 
kind." 

2d.  And  the  following  are  the  words  of  our  State  consti- 
tution which  you  had  forgotten,  or  hoped  the  Abolitionists 
had :  "  Every  citizen  may  freely  speak,  write  and  publish  his 
sentiments  on  all  subjects,  being  responsible  for  the  abuse  of 
that  right ;  and  no  law  shall  be  passed  to  restrain  or  abridge 
the  liberty  of  speech  or  of  the  press." 

The  8th  section  of  the  7th  article  of  our  constitution 
shows  you  and  the  world  that  the  people  of  this  State  never 
surrendered  the  liberty  of  speech,  discussion,  or  the  press  to 
the  legislature.  Oh,  what  scenes  of  abuse  would  have  been 
played  off  before  this  world,  if  licensed  presses,  gagged  dis- 
cussion, and  mail  inquisitors  had  been  tolerated !  And  we 
should  have  seen  such  laws  passed  in  this  State  by  a  party 
who  had  the  ascendency,  if  the  constitution  had  not  forbid- 
den it,  by  which  one  half  of  the  community  could  neither 
speak,  write  nor  publish  anything  of  their  adversaries,  under 
the  pain  of  indictments,  fine  and  imprisonment.  We  infer 
this  from  the  nature  of  man,  for  those  arguments  which 
reason  cannot  answer,  force  has  often  attempted.  We  see 
you  willing  (in  case  Abolitionism  continues  to  hold  up  its 
head),  in  subserviency  to  slave  dictation,  to  leap  the  barriers 
of  the  constitution,  and  advise  the  legislature  to  do  the  same 
act,  and  seize  upon  the  liberties  of  speech,  discussion  and  the 
press.  Yes,  you  profess  your  willingness  to  make  slaves  of 
the  Abolitionists,  load  them  with  chains  and  cover  them  with 
disgrace,  trample  on  the  ruined  Constitution  of  your  country, 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.       67 

to  purchase  the  haughty  smile  that  may  play  over  the 
features  of  that  despot  who  owns  five  hundred  slaves,  as  he 
sees  the  Empire  State  wallowing  in  the  mire  of  tyranny,  and 
bowing  down  its  head  in  fearful  trepidation  before  the  unre- 
lenting cruelties  of  slavery  and  the  boisterous  howls  of  des- 
potism. You  may  lay  the  axe  to  the  root  of  the  tree  of 
liberty,  you  may  cut  it  down,  so  that  liberty  of  speech,  dis- 
cussion, and  the  press  shall  be  laid  in  one  common  grave ; 
this  is  the  course  adopted  by  mobs,  in  anticipation  of  your 
legislative  recommendation ;  by  those  mobs  which  have  dis- 
honored your  administration,  and  have  nearly  overwhelmed 
the  republic ;  let  them  cheer  you  and  the  makers  of  those 
laws ;  but  be  assured  those  laws  when  passed  will  be 
treated  with  scorn  and  contempt,  and  their  execution,  when 
attempted,  will  be  written  in  blood. 

ABOLITIONISTS    ABOVE-BOARD. 

Abolitionists  have  nothing  to  conceal ;  their  actions  are 
done  on  the  house-top,  their  progress  is  under  the  eye  of  the 
world,  their  march  is  in  the  face  of  the  sun,  they  have  no 
community  to  abuse  and  mislead,  they  have  no  mobs  to 
inebriate  and  flatter,  they  have  no  support  but  religion  and 
humanity,  they  have  no  power  but  the  opinion  of  the  civi- 
lized world  and  the  voice  of  eternal  truth ;  they  have  no 
auxiliaries,  but  everlasting  justice,  and  enlightened  con- 
science ;  they  have  no  prospect  of  success,  but  in  the  inability 
of  eleven  slave  States  to  resist  their  own  good,  and  brave  the 
withering  scorn  of  an  insulted  world. 

You  seem  to  sneer  at  "  the  potency  of  abolition  arguments 
to  instruct  a  slaveholder  in  his  duty."  You  assert  that  the 
slaveholders  understand  and  practise  the  rights  and  duties 
growing  out  of  civil  and  political  liberty,  as  well  as  the 
citizen  of  the  North.  Is  it  so,  governor  ?  Then  you  ap- 
prove of  Governor  McDuffie's  message,  who  asserts  slavery 


68  ALVAN   STEWART 

to  be  right,  and  the  pillar  of  the  social  edifice ;  and  what 
would  incline  one  to  have  no  doubt,  that  at  heart  you  love 
slavery  like  a  southerner,  you  do  nowhere  in  your  turgid 
message,  even  insinuate  that  slavery  is  wrong,  or  express  the 
feeblest  desire  it  should  come  to  an  end.  The  fair  interpre- 
tation, in  the  judgment  of  charity,  is,  that  your  message 
was  intended  as  an  artful  indorsement  of  all  the  bold  and 
horrible  doctrines  of  McDuffie's  message,  by  which  two  and 
one-fourth  millions  of  human  beings  are  to  toil  under  the  mer- 
cies of  the  lash,  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave.  And  you,  sir, 
educated  hi  the  suushine  of  New  England's  morality  and 
abhorrence  of  slavery,  have  for  a  mess  of  slaveholding  presi- 
dental  pottage,  proved  traitor  to  the  -rights  of  man,  and  in 
defiance  of  reason  and  conscience, -thrown  yourself  into  the 
putrid  and  cancerous  embraces  of  slavery. 

You  have  published  the  bans  of  your  marriage  to  slavery, 
in  a  message  to  the  legislature  of  this  State — what  will  be  the 
fruits  of  your  elevated  alliance  it  requires  neither  second 
sight  nor  a  prophet  to  tell ;  it  will  be  dishonor  and  unmeasured 
regret. 

MOBS,   THE    PANACEA   FOB   ERRORS    OF   OPIXION. 

You  say,  "I  rely  on  the  influence  of  public  opinion  to 
restrain  the  misconduct  of  citizens  of  a  free  government, 
especially  when  directed  with  such  unexampled  energy  and 
unanimity  to  the  evils  under  consideration,  and  perceiving 
that  its  operations  have  thus  far  been  salutary,  I  entertain  the 
best  hopes  that  this  remedy  itself  will  entirely  remove  the 
evils  or  render  them  comparatively  harmless." 

Thus  we  have  your  solemn  indorsement  of  all  the  mobs 
which  have,  or  may  hereafter,  disgrace  your  administration ; 
all  the  mobs  which  by  violence  may  drive  the  freemen  of  this 
State  from  their  own  houses  and  churches,  while  discussing 
the  questions  as  to  the  evils  of  slavery,  and  the  best  manner 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE    OF   GOVERNOR   MAROY.      69 

of  terminating  those  evils — yes,  these  mobs  are  what  you 
call  a  "  sound  and  enlightened  public  opinion,"  headed  by 
some  half-a-dozen  minions  of  slavery,  your  friends,  leading 
them  on  with  clubs,  stones,  brick-bats,  the  dregs  of  community 
under  the  influence  of  liquor,  maddened  by  your  street  orators, 
at  sentiments  charged  on  Abolitionists  they  never  entertained, 
opinions  they  never  advanced,  projects  they  never  harbored. 
Then  the  mob  will  advance  upon  tHe  house  of  silence,  order, 
sobriety,  philanthropy  and  prayer,  and  with  all  sorts  of 
screams  and  yells,  throw  missiles  and  break  doors  and 
windows,  with  oaths,  blasphemies,  swearing  vengeance  while 
they  rush  into  the  house  like  famished  tigers,  and  drive  with 
violence  and  blood  the  inmates  therefrom,  while  they  tear  the 
Bibles  and  psalm-books  in  tatters,  threatening  instant  death 
to  some,  and  violence  to  all ;  the  whole  night  after  being  spent 
in  drunkenness  and  debauchery,  while  the  village  or  city  is 
horror-struck  by  the  violence,  misrule  and  uproar. 

This  is  your  enlightened  public  opinion,  which  you  and  the 
minions  of  slavery  have  brought  to  bear  on  Abolitionists  the 
past  year,  which  you  so  highly  approve — and  hope  will  still 
be  employed.  Is  this  the  governor  of  the  State  of  New 
York,  who  is  the  leader  of  mobs  by  a  public  approval  in  his 
message  of  1836  to  the •  legislature  of  this  State?  A  mob, 
which  all  men  but  yourself,  who  have  dared  to  write  on  the 
subject,  have  considered  a  greater  evil  than  any  possible  one 
they  could  be  invoked  to  remedy,  you  have  selected  as  one 
of  the  most  efficient  and  salutary  means  of  correcting  errors 
of  opinion.  The  mobs  of  1835  have  done  more  to  destroy 
the  confidence  of  the  friends  of  liberty,  in  a  republican  form 
of  government,  than  all  the  untoward  events  which  have 
happened  since  the  settlement  of  America. 

But  I  need  not  pause  to  inform  a  statesman  of  the  opera- 
tions of  a  machine,  which  he  has  selected  as  the  leading 
executive  organ  of  his  administration,  a  remedy  so  salutary 


70  ALVAN   STEWART. 

in  its  nature,  so  healthy  and  vigorous  in  its  effects,  in  dis- 
lodging error  from  the  human  mind,  being  especially  calcu- 
lated for  this  end  from  its  moderation  in  action,  its  wisdom  in 
the  selection  of  its  arguments,  the  urbanity  with  which  they 
are  enforced — being  only  equalled  by  the  conclusiveness  of 
the  logic  employed  to  illuminate  a  mind  lost  in  the  labyrinths 
of  fanatical  incendiary  recklessness,  which  means,  to  wish  a 
slave  a  freeman,  and  instead  of  a  brute  for  a  master,  that  he 
may  have  the  law. 

You  suppose  your  new  discovery  to  be  a  universal  panacea 
in  government.  If  men  are  wrong  in  their  notions  on  the 
subject  of  religion,  or  do  not  think  like  a  majority  of  their 
neighbors,  let  a  mob  go  and  burn  their  houses  or  barns ; 
that  will  make  them  think  like  the  majority ;  or  if  the  minority 
should  discuss  their  opinions  in  their  own  houses  or  churches, 
let  the  mob  in  upon  them  with  a  flood  of  brick-bats  ;  they 
will  see  the  errors  of  liberty  of  speech  and  free  discussion, 
and  repent  of  it  in  the  awfulness  of  silence. 

A  stone  sent  against  a  man's  head  by  a  mob,  is  the  short 
and  improved  mode  of  introducing  truth  in  the  place  of  false- 
hood. Do  I  need  an  authority  to  sustain  this  position  ?  I 
will  cite  to  you  the  governor  of  Xew  York's  message  to  the 
legislature  of  New  York,  in  January,  1836.  If  a  man  is 
affected  with  philanthropy,  or  love  to  his  fellow  man,  let  a 
mob  of  tigers  lead  him  by  a  rope  around  his  neck,  and  choke 
him  till  he  is  black — he  will  see  his  mistake.  If  a  man  has 
ssen  that  passage  of  Holy  Writ,  by  which  we  are  com- 
manded, "  Whatsoever  things  ye  would  that  men  should  do 
unto  you,  do  the  same  thing  to  them,"  let  the  individual  be 
taken  by  a  mob,  tarred,  feathered,  and  then  be  carried  two 
miles  on  a  sharp  rail  with  a  string  of  cow-bells  hanging  round 
his  neck.  This  is  Governor  Marcy's  medicine  for  a  mind  so 
obstinately  diseased — and  he  hopes  that,  by  such  a  course, 
this  fanatic  will  read  his  Bible  in  this  way,  "  Whatsoever 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.      71 

you  would  not  that  men  should  do  unto  you,  do  tJiat  unto 
them."  The  grand  benefit  of  this  scheme,  when  carried  out 
in  its  fullest  extent,  is  to  save  a  community  from  the  trouble 
or  distraction  of  having  two  or  more  opinions  on  one  sub- 
ject. By  applying  mob  law,  we  need  have  but  one  opinion, 
on  any  subject  from  an  oyster  to  a  fixed  star. 

It  may  become  useful  to  have  a  military  mob  at  the  Capitol, 
to  cut  short  protracted  discussion  ;  let  the  government  origi- 
nate whatsoever  laws  the  public  welfare  may  require,  and  if 
Congress  were  taught  a  few  wholesome  rules  of  military 
mobism,  they  too  have  nothing  to  do  but  to  think  like  the 
government ;  and  if  any  man  is  refractory,  and  wishes  to 
discuss,  let  him.  be  shot  through  the  head  with  an  ounce  ball, 
and  he  will  never  think  different  from  the  government  again, 
or  discuss.  Thus  Congress  might  do  all  the  business  of  the 
nation  in  the  afternoon,  and  save  the  country  much  expense 
in  sitting  from  December  to  July,  employed  in  noisy  dis- 
cussions and  clamorous  debate. 

ABOLITIONISM   DYING. 

But,  sir,  in  stating  the  fact  that  abolition  is  hastening  to  an 
end  in  this  State,  you  are  greatly  mistaken,  for  since  the  Con- 
vention was  broken  up  in  Utica,  by  your  mob-regulation,  in 
administering  one  of  their  salutary  lessons  of  rebuke,  one 
hundred  and  fifty  societies  have  been  added  to  the  Abolition- 
ists. 

Governor,  you  are  like  some  other  men  who  state  their 
wishes  for  facts,  and  are  not  able  to  distinguish  between 
their  meditations  by  day,  and  their  dreams  by  night. 

But  am  I  mistaken  in  supposing  this  part  of  your  message 
was  made  to  order,  for  transportation  south  of  the  Potomac, 
and  was  not  intended  for  domestic  use,  but  was  intended, 
as  a  New  Year's  present  to  your  southern  friends,  therefore 
is  not  subject  to  the  common  laws  of  criticism,  which  require 


72  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

certainty  enough  to  make  it  a  relative  to  a  probability  ?  Per- 
mit me  to  assure  you,  that  the  attempt  of  the  mob  at  Utica, 
to  suppress  free  discussion  by  a  convention  of  more  than  five 
hundred  men,  as  respectable  as  any  body  of  persons  who  ever 
met  for  the  public  good,  on  this  continent,  has  been  the  direct 
means  of  adding  thousands  to  the  Abolitionists. 

Let  me  assure  you  further  that  your  leading  political  friends 
in  this  vicinity,  many  of  them,  one  year  ago  signed  a  petition 
to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia ;  I  mention  this 
to  prove,  as  conclusive  evidence,  the  general  abhorrence 
society,  uninfluenced  by  extraneous  causes,  feels  against  the 
crime  of  slavery.  I  think  he  must  be  an  unapt  scholar  in 
human  affairs,  who  can  draw  any  distinction  between  the 
crime  of  slavery,  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  or  in  the  State 
of  South  Carolina. 

THE  CONSTITUTION  AND   SLAVEET. 

You  seem  to  assert  that  some  section,  article,  or,  if  neither, 
the  spirit  of  the  Constitution  of  the  Union,  is  violated  in  the 
crusade  of  Abolitionists  against  slavery.  To  redeem  that 
instrument  from  the  imputation  thrown  on  it  as  perpetually 
upholding  slavery  has  been  the  main  cause  of  this  communi- 
cation. What  is  there  in  our  federal  Constitution  since  the 
expiration  of  the  9th  section  of  the  1st  article  in  1808,  on  the 
subject  of  slavery?  For  I  admit  that  ah1  the  horrors  of 
slavery  were  wrapped  up  in  the  9th  section  of  the  1st  article 
which  expired  in  1808.  Its  words  are  these :  "  The  migration 
or  importation  of  such  persons  as  the  States  now  existing  shall 
think  proper  to  admit  shall  not  be  prohibited  before  1808," 
which  section,  strange  to  relate,  is  made  irrepealable  by  the 
Constitution-making  power  itself,  by  a  clause  in  the  5th  arti- 
cle. Sir,  the  Constitution  itself,  in  providing  for  the  short 
life  of  the  9th  section,  thereby  impliedly  admits  the  wrong 
which  might  be  done  under  it,  in  taking  the  slave  trade  into 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.      73 

its  arras  for  nineteen  years,  and  covering  it  under  its  sanc- 
tions. Do  you  not  know  that  under  the  soft  and  mild  phrase- 
ology, "  The  migration  or  importation  of  such  persons  as  the 
States  now  existing  think  proper  to  admit,  etc.,  from  1789  to 
1808,"  for  the  space  of  nineteen  long  years,  not  less  than  one 
million  of  the  fathers  and  mothers  of  the  present  generation 
of  slaves  were  stolen  and  kidnapped  from  Africa  by  virtue 
of  the  irrepealable  9th  section  of  the  1st  article?  Yes,  the 
South  refused  the  benefit  of  this  Constitution,  and  of  the  con- 
federacy, and  were  willing  to  forego  all  the  blessings  it  con- 
fers, rather  than  surrender  the  bloody  advantages  of  the  slave 
trade  for  nineteen  years.  This  reveals  the  secret,  and  shows 
which  at  that  time  they  would  have  preferred,  the  atrocity 
of  the  slave  trade,  or  the  Union  without  it.  And  to  bring 
the  South  into  the  measure  of  the  Union  and  adoption  of  the 
Constitution,  the  ISTorth  were  constrained,  in  their  then  dis- 
tressed condition,  to  accept  the  Constitution,  on  such  bloody 
and  cruel  terms.  What  an  instrument  to  hold  up  in  the  face 
of  the  sun  in  the  presence  of  the  civilized  world ! 

The  bonus  or  premium  given  by  the  North  to  the  South 
for  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution,  as  the  sine  qud  non  on 
the  part  of  the  South,  was  that  the  slave  States  for  nineteen 
years  should  have  the  unforbidden  right  to  ci'imson  every 
river  of  Africa  with  the  blood  of  her  children,  the  right  for 
nineteen  years  to  make  her  valleys  and  mountains  echo  with 
groans  of  her  kidnapped  sons  and  daughters,  the  constitu- 
tional right  for  nineteen  years  to  pillage,  rob,  ravish  and 
murder  her  inhabitants,  and  by  the  light  of  their  blazing 
homes,  make  midnight  like  noon,  to  pursue  and  overtake  the 
affrighted  and  horror-struck  inhabitants  and  load  them  with 
fetters,  in  a  ship  of  the  middle  passage,  many  of  whose  bodies 
fattened  the  wake-pursuing  sharks,  while  the  men  of  the 
Carolinas  stood  upon  the  shore,  to  purchase  the  survivors 
under  the  irrepealable  ninth  section. 
4 


74  ALVAN    STEWART. 

This  expired  ninth  section  of  our  Constitution,  to  our 
eternal  dishonor,  was  the  most  solemn  and  deliberate  insult 
ever  offered  to  our  common  humanity,  and  is  without  a 
parallel  in  the  long  annals  of  human  atrocity ;  but  thank 
God — in  1 808  it  came  to  an  end. 

Since  1808,  that  instrument  is  free  from  the  imputation  of 
sustaining  slavery,  directly  or  indirectly ;  and  the  man  who 
should  offer  it  as  an  authority  to  prove  the  perpetuity  of 
slavery,  ought  to  blush  for  his  temerity.  Its  silence  in  the  use 
of  the  word  slave  is  a  rebuke  louder  than  a  thunder  peal, 
telling  the  world  slavery  should  never  exist  by  its  authority, 
that  if  the  offence  was  committed,  for  the  first  nineteen  years 
of  its  existence,  yet  the  absence  of  the  word  "  slavery  "  was  a 
protest  against  the  offence,  and  an  everlasting  acknowledg- 
ment of  the  shame  the  instrument  would  have  felt  by  its 
insertion. 

The  Congress  of  the  United  States,  in  May  1820,  to  mani- 
fest the  horror  they  felt,  for  the  crimes  committed  under 
the  9th  section  of  the  first  article  of  the  Constitution,  then 
expired,  declared  by  a  public  law,  that  any  American  citizen, 
who  should  be  guilty  of  kidnapping,  or  taking  a  negro  from 
Africa  (being  the  precise  act  tolerated  by  the  Constitution 
from  1789  to  1808),  should  be  declared  a  pirate  and  punished 
with  death.  Sir,  is  not  the  act  of  Congress  of  1820,  the  most 
solemn  rebuke  ever  found  in  the  records  of  legislation,  of  the 
evils  tolerated  in  the  9th  section  of  the  first  article? 

The  3d  section  of  the  1st  article  of  the  Constitution,  for 
the  purpose  of  fixing  the  basis  of  a  representation  in  Con- 
gress, says  that  "  to  the  whole  number  of  free  persons,  in- 
cluding those  bound  to  service  for  a  term  of  years,  and 
excluding  Indians  not  taxed,  three-fifths  of  all  other  persons 
are  to  be  added."  This  section,  the  friends  of  slavery  con- 
tend is  a  constitutional  compact,  to  uphold  and  maintain 
slavery ;  I  contend  it  proves  the  reverse  of  the  proposition, 


RESPONSE  TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.      75 

and  is  a  section  which  expresses,  in  spirit  if  not  in  words, 
the  abhorrence  this  Constitution  has  for  slavery.  The  free 
States,  in  fixing  a  basis  for  a  ratio  of  representation,  include 
every  man,  woman,  child,  pauper,  idiot,  alien,  criminal  or 
malefactor,  in  those  States,  under  the  word  "  free  persons," 
in  the  first  line  quoted  from  the  section.  "What  is  the  argu- 
ment or  fact  insisted  on  by  the  slave  States  ?  Why,  that 
under  the  word,  "persons,"  their  slaves  shall  be  counted  in 
fixing  the  ratio  or  basis  of  representation,  as  a  counterpoise 
to  the  women,  children,  idiots,  paupers,  aliens  and  criminals, 
included  under  the  words  "free  persons,  in  Massachusetts." 
The  non-slaveholding  States,  or  those  who  had  but  few  slaves 
and  were  in  a  course  of  emancipation,  saw  their  opportunity, 
which  they  did  not  fail  to  improve,  to  wit,  that  if  slaves  were 
to  be  counted  as  persons,  in  fixing  the  ratio  or  basis  of  rep- 
resentation, five  slaves  should  count  no  more,  in  the  enumer- 
ation, than  three  free  persons ;  which  would  be  a  continual 
encouragement,  and,  in  fact,  a  premium  to  be  paid  in  political 
power  for  the  emancipation  of  the  slaves,  who  would  then 
swell  in  the  count  from  three  to  five-fifths.  If  all  the  slaves 
were  made  free,  in  the  slave  States,  those  States  would  be  en- 
titled to  twelve  more  members  of  Congress  than  they  now 
have.  This  is  the  amount  of  political  power  offered  by  the 
Constitution  to  the  slave  States,  in  case  those  States  will 
emancipate  their  slaves.  The  language  of  this  section  of  the 
Constitution  is,  slavery  is  wrong,  and  you  of  the  slave  States 
are  to  be  punished  in  the  loss  of  political  power,  as  long  as 
you  uphold  it ;  by  abating  the  amount  of  your  representation 
in  Congress  two-fifths  upon  this  class  of  persons,  it  is  intended 
to  express  the  abhorrence  the  Constitution  has  against  sla- 
very, by  an  abatement  of  your  political  power,  until  you  set 
your  slaves  free. 

This  is  a  constitutional  premium  in  favor  of  human  liberty. 

Suppose  the  Constitution  had  on  its  face  forbidden  the 


76  A.LVAN    STEWART. 

slaves  to  be  taken  into  the  account,  in  fixing  a  basis  of  repre- 
sentation. Would  not  this  have  been  the  strongest  ex- 
pression possible  against  slavery  ?  If  that  would  be  the 
effect  of  a  total  rejection  of  the  slave  enumeration,  is  not  the 
argument  the  same  in  kind,  if  not  in  degree,  which  rejects 
two-fifths  of  the  slave  census  ? 

Thus  the  Constitution  shows  itself  inimical  to  slavery,  in 
that  way  which  would  most  strongly  tend  to  its  abolition.  If 
the  slave  had  not  been  taken  into  the  enumeration  upon  any 
principle,  the  bounty  offered  by  the  Constitution,  for  their 
emancipation,  would  have  been  forty  representatives,  in  Con- 
gress, to  which  their  numbers,  when  emancipated,  would  en- 
title them.  The  tone  of  political  power  would  have  been  too 
strong  for  slavery  itself,  and  would  have  burst  its  bonds. 

If  this  argument  is  sound  when  applied  to  a  rejection  of  the 
whole  number  of  slaves,  it  must  be  when  applied  to  the  re- 
jection of  two-fifths;  the  difference  is  only  in  degree;  in  the 
supposed  case,  the  bounty  paid  for  emancipation  would  be 
forty  seats  in  Congress,  whereas  it  now  offers  twelve  or 
thirteen.  The  principle  is  the  same.  The  Constitution  is 
neutral ;  it  leans  many  degrees  in  favor  of  liberty,  and  against 
slavery  as  a  system ;  not  barely  in  cold  advice,  but  in  holding 
up  motives  of  political  power^for  its  abandonment. 

The  apologists  for  slavery  at  the  North  and  South,  who 
wish  to  hang  upon  the  skirts  of  the  Constitution,  and  convert 
the  temple  of  liberty  into  a  cave  of  slavery,  claim  to  find  a 
constitutional  compact  for  slavery  in  the  2d  section  of  the 
4th  article  of  the  Constitution,  by  which  persons  held  to 
service  under  the  laws  of  one  State,  escaping  into  another, 
shall  be  delivered  up,  on  claim  of  the  persons  to  whom  the 
service  is  due.  Though  slaves  may  have  been  delivered  up, 
who  were  even  fugitives  from  one  State  to  another,  by  virtue 
of  this  provision,  yet,  it  does  not  follow,  that  this  section  was 
necessarily  created  for  such  an  object. 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVEENOK   MAKCT.      77 

No,  sir,  a  man  who  should  contract  to  work  for  another 
two  years,  or  any  other  given  time,  an  apprentice  bound  to 
his  master,  a  principal  fleeing  from  his  bail,  or  a  child  from 
his  parent,  or  a  wife  from  her  husband,  would  all  fairly  come 
within  the  scope  of  this  provision  of  the  Constitution,  and 
fulfill  its  spirit  and  letter,  without  necessarily  including  or 
excluding  fugitive  slaves.  And  this  section  of  the  4th  arti- 
cle of  the  Constitution  would  be  equally  necessary  as  now, 
if  there  were  not  a  slave  in  this  land.  The  Constitu- 
tion would  be  clearly  defective,  without  such  section,  were 
there  no  slaves,  for  the  surrender  of  the  apprentice,  the  prin- 
cipal in  case  of  bail,  the  wife,  the  child,  etc.,  fleeing  from 
those  persons  to  whom  their  services  were  due.  Suppose 
there  was  a  treaty  between  England  and  the  United  States, 
that  England  would  surrender  up  all  fugitive  slaves  fleeing 
to  her  dominions  from  the  United  States,  to  their  owner, 
would  that  treaty  be  a  bar  to  England's  expositions  to  obtain 
from  us  the  abolition  of  slavery  ?  No  !  Strange  would  be 
the  reply  of  the  United  States  if  she  should  say,  "  Ah !  Eng- 
land, by  agreeing  to  surrender  our  fugitive  slaves,  you  have 
covenanted  slavery  is  right ;  you  therefore  have  barred  your- 
self from  censuring  the  practice;  you  have  adopted  it  and 
made  it  your  own ;  the  agreement  to  surrender  is  an  agree- 
ment that  slavery  is  an  institution  of  Heaven  and  a  pillar  of 
the  social  system.  You  have  no  business  to  intermeddle, 
expostulate,  or  even  to  endeavor  to  convince,  by  arguments, 
that  it  is  wrong." 

This  would  be  called  strange  morality,  and  still  stranger 
logic.  The  Constitution  in  many  of  its  parts  is  nothing  but 
a  treaty  between  the  then  thirteen,  now  twenty-four  States, 
doing  that  by  a  perpetual  Constitution,  which  independent 
nations  do  by  treaty.  The  second  section  of  the  4th  article 
is  of  this  character,  and  does  by  no  means  sustain  slavery,  on 
its  face  or  by  necessity,  but  without  the  clause,  if  there  was 


•  78  ALVAN   STEWART. 

not  a  slave  in  the  land,  the  States  would  be  involved  in  con- 
tinual difficulties,  in  relation  to  those  persons  fleeing  from 
one  State  to  another. 

AMERICAN    SENTIMENT    AND    LEGISLATION. 

It  shall  be  ray  business  to  show  .that,  as  far  as  this  nation 
has  acted  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  the  nation  is  anti-slavery 
in  its  character,  and  abolitionist,  as  it  concerns  the  great 
crime  against  man.  So  far  as  its  opinions  and  sentiments 
are  deducible  from  its  laws,  a  brief  review  of  national  legisla- 
tion may  be  instructive  in  its  deductions.  For  it  is  said  the 
character  of  a  people  may  be  learned  in  their  laws.  This  is  a 
political  axiom. 

The  first  Continental  Congress  which  met  in  Philadelphia 
in  17*74,  expressed  its  deep  abhorrence  of  slavery,  and  mani- 
fested its  principles  in  a  resolution  of  loud  condemnation  of 
the  slave  trade,  by  a  resolution  not  to  import  or  purchase 
any  slave  imported  after  December,  in  that  year,  and  thus 
abolish  the  trade. 

2d.  The  Constitution  of  the  United  States  refused  to  coun- 
tenance the  slave  trade  after  the  first  of  January,  1808. 

3d.  By  the  acts  of  Congress  passed  March  22,  1794,  and 
May  10,  1800,  citizens  and  residents  of  the  United  States 
were  forbidden,  under  penalties,  from  engaging  in  the  trans- 
portation of  slaves  from  the  United  States  to  any  other  coun- 
try ;  or  from  one  foreign  country  to  another  foreign  country, 
for  the  purpose  of  traffic.  In  fact,  these  States  presented  the 
moral  absurd,  on  account  of  the  9th  section  of  the  1st  article 
of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States.  These  two  acts 
of  Congress  forbid  the  American  -citizen  from  being  con- 
cerned in  the  slave  trade  everywhere,  except  he  brought  the 
slave  to  his  own  land. 

4th.  By  an  act  of  Congress,  passed  2d  March,  1807,  the 
slave  trade  was  prohibited  after  the  1st  of  January,  1808, 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.      79 

under  a  severe  penalty,  being  the  day  the  9th  section  of  the 
1st  article  expired. 

5th.  On  the  26th  April,  1818,  Congress  passed  a  law,  by 
which  the  penalties  were  increased  for  importing  slaves. 

Gth.  By  an  act  of  Congress,  passed  in  1819,  armed  vessels 
were  authorized  to  go  to  the  African  coast  and  stop  the 
trade,  as  far  as  our  citizens  were  concerned,  and  seize  the 
vessels  of  those  who  had  slaves. 

7th.  By  an  act  of  Congress,  passed  15th  May,  1820,  it  was 
declared  that  if  any  American  citizen,  or  any  person  for  him, 
should  land  in  Africa,  and  import  a  person  therefrom,  with 
the  intent  of  making  him  a  slave,  or  forcibly  bring  said  per- 
son on  board  said  ship,  such  citizen  or  person  should  be 
adjudged  a  pirate,  and  on  conviction,  suffer  death. 

Thus  we  have  no  less  than  seven  solemn  expressions  of  the 
nation ;  one  a  resolution  of  the  old  Congress,  and  six  acts  of 
Congress  since  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution. 

Thus  we  see  public  opinion,  as  the  law,  marching  forward 
in  a  steady  progress,  from  the  simple  resolve  that  it  was 
wrong,  through  all  the  grades  of  ascending  penalty,  till  the 
crime  became  piracy,  and  its  punishment  death. 

The  principle  on  which  these  laws  of  the  nation  rest,  is 
that  slavery  is  a  crime,  perpetrated  by  him  who  deprives 
another  of  his  liberty  by  dispossessing  him  of  all  right  to  the 
fruit  of  his  own  labor,  or  the  benefit  of  his  own  powers, 
mental  or  corporeal.  Can  the  wit  of  man  show  me  any  dif- 
ference'in  the  extent  or  amount  of  injury  done  to  a  slave,  in 
being  stripped  of  all  the  rights  which  make  him  a  man, 
whether  it  be  done  north  or  south  of  the  equator,  in  this 
parallel  of  longitude  or' that  degree  of  latitude,  on  this  side 
of  the  world  or  the  other,  in  Africa,  on  the  ocean,  in  Caro- 
lina or  Vermont  ? 

The  injury  done  to  him  is  one  and  indivisible,  the  same  in  all 
times  and  all  places.  To  him  all  forms  of  government  are 


80  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

alike,  he  can  claim  nothing  from  any ;  the  despotism  of 
Turkey,  the  monarchy  of  France,  the  republic  of  the  United 
States,  find  him  nothing  but  a  thing  bereaved  of  every 
natural  or  acquired  right.  No  change  changes  his  destiny. 
The  slave  is  the  same  anywhere,  everywhere,  in  all  times,  the 
same  yesterday,  to-day  and  forever.  If  so,  how  powerfully 
do  these  acts  of  Congress  upbraid  and  reproach  every  slave- 
holder in  this  nation,  and  you,  his  apologist,  with  injustice. 

Those  statutes  are  a  moral  indictment  in  which  every  slave- 
holder in  this  nation  may  find  his  name,  with  that  of  his  apolo- 
gists included.  If  the  lowest  moan  of  the  oppressed  is  heard 
and  remembered  in  heaven  against  the  oppressor,  what  must 
be  the  size  of  your  offence  against  poor  miserable  humanity, 
to  throw  the  weight  of  your  official  temporary  consequence 
against  the  slave,  by  which  he  may  be  sunk  lower  in  the 
mire,  and  be  made  an  exile  from  the  land  of  his  fathers  no 
less  than  from  your  cold  bosom. 

Have  not  the  northern  States,  in  consenting  to  the  9th  sec- 
tion of  the  1st  article  for  nineteen  years,  become  "  particeps 
criminis  "  against  those,  or  the  children  of  those,  who  were 
brought  here  by  it  ?  Have  we  not  a  right  to  repent  and 
remonstrate  with  our  partners  in  guilt,  who  are  now  rolling 
in  wealth  on  the  unpaid  labor  of  those  beings,  or  their  child- 
ren, brought  here  under  the  9th  section  ?  But  you  still 
point  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  to  uphold  this 
offence — you  would  fain  make  it  confess  itself  the  citadel  of 
slavery.  Is  this  Constitution  that  nondescript,  in  politi- 
tical  science,  with  the  words  of  liberty  on  its  tongue,  and 
republicanism  in  its  mouth  ;  is  it  that  hag,  "  which  palters  in 
a  double  sense,  and  keeps  the  word  of  promise  to  the  ear,  to 
break  it  to  the  hope  ?"  Does  it  veil  beneath  its  folds  an 
eternal  engagement  to  keep  millions  in  the  most  hopeless 
bondage  ? 

A  rule  of  great  benignity  in  the  construction  of  a  statute, 


RESPONSE   TO    THE    MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.      81 

for  which  we  are  indebted  to  that  great  legacy  of  wisdom 
bequeathed  us  by  the  common  law,  is,  that  where  words  in  a 
statute  admit  of  a  double  construction,  that  which  is  in  favor 
of  human  liberty  and  justice  is  always  to  be  adopted. 
Another  rule  derived  from  the  same  source  is,  that  when 
there  is  doubt  in  the  construction  of  a  statute,  the  preamble 
of  that  statute  may  be  resorted  to  as  a  key  to  unlock  the 
mind  and  true  intent  of  the  legislature  in  the  enactment  of 
the  law.  Let  us  apply  these  principles  to  the  Constitution 
of  the  Union. 

Is  it  to  be  believed  or  endured  that  a  Constitution  whose 
preamble  proclaims  to  the  world  that  it  wras  made  "  for  a 
more  perfect  union,  to  establish  justice,  promote  the  general 
welfare  and  secure  the  blessings  of  liberty  to  ourselves  and 
our  posterity  forever,"  is  only  a  covenant  of  eternal  injustice, 
with  everduring  misery  to  millions  of  our  population  ?  If 
your  construction  of  this  Constitution,  writh  that  of  the  slave- 
holder's be  right,  the  preamble  should  have  been  in  these 
words :  "  We,  the  people  of  the  United  States,  in  order  to 
establish  successful  injustice  and  eternal  tyranny  over  the 
millions  of  our  black  population,  and  to  secure  our  own  inde- 
pendence, welfare  and  prosperity  as  far  as  white  men  are 
concerned,  do  establish,"  etc. 

We  have  the  direct  authority  of  the  framers  of  the  Consti- 
tution, that  their  object  in  the  Constitution  was  to  promote 
liberty  and  justice ;  you  and  your  southern  friends  by  your 
construction  say  it  was  made  to  promote  eternal  injustice,  and 
hopeless  slavery  to  millions.  Which  shall  prevail,  your 
opinion  or  that  of  the  men  who  made  it  ? 

Could  a  stranger  to  our  institutions  find  the  time  or  section 
where  slavery  is  sustained  in  the  Constitution  ? 

Would  he  find  it  in  the  4th  section  of  the  4th  article,  which 
guarantees  to  every  State  in  the  Union  a  republican  form  of 
government  ? 

4* 


82  ALT  AN    STEWART. 

Would  he  select  Louisiana,  a  State  in  which  a  majority  of 
the  inhabitants  are  slaves,  and  some  of  them  with  chains  on 
their  legs,  with  iron  bands  belting  their  waists  and  necks, 
with  iron  horns  four  feet  in  length  fastened  to  those  iron  col- 
lars, to  prevent  the  wearer's  escape,  in  the  cane-brakes,  while 
others  have  a  chain  twenty  feet  long  fastened  to  the  belt  of 
the  waist,  at  one  end,  while  the  other  is  united  to  a  sixty 
pound  weight  of  iron,  which  the  slave  lifts  and  carries  in 
advance,  the  length  of  his  chain,  and  then  returns  and  works 
up  to  it  with  his  hoe,  and  thus  repeats  the  operation  as  often 
as  necessary,  and  when  night  comes,  amidst  rattling  chains, 
cracking  whips,  and  gory  backs,  they  are  marched  into 
pounds,  and  again  chained  to  staples  in  the  wall,  till  the  coin- 
ing morn  ?  Yes,  the  4th  section  of  the  4th  article  is  a  stand- 
ing covenant  against  slavery. 

And  it  is  impossible  to  fulfill  that  guaranty  of  a  republican 
form  of  government  while  one  half  of  the  persons  in  a  State 
are  slaves  to  another.  For,  could  Louisiana  writh  100,000 
white  men  and  200,000  slaves  be  said  to  have  a  repub- 
lican form  of  government,  which  regards  all  persons  as  equal 
in  the  eye  of  the  law  ? 

This  section  of  the  Constitution  is  violated  by  every  slave 
State,  and  will  never  be  honored  or  respected  till  universal 
emancipation  takes  place. 

For  the  very  idea  of  a  republican  form  of  government  holds 
all  persons  under  it  equal  in  the  eye  of  the 'law.  Can  a  State 
tolerating  slavery  be  said  to  have  a  republican  form  of  gov- 
ernment ?  If  so,  the  most  stupid  tyranny  which  ever  governed 
the  dolts  of  India  may  be  called  a  republican  form  of  govern- 
ment. An  aristocracy  might  be  called  a  republican  form  of 
government,  for  in  that  form  the  grandees  are  equal ;  but  the 
common  people  are  not  the  equals  of  the  grandees,  in  the 
eye  of  the  law,  any  more  than  the  slaves  of  Carolina  are  the 
equals  of  Gov.  McDuffie  in  the  eye  of  the  law. 


RESPONSE   TO   THE   MESSAGE   OF   GOVERNOR   MARCY.       83 
OMISSIONS   IN  THE   MESSAGE. 

The  time  may  not  be  far  distant,  when  the  ghost  of  this 
message  Avill  haunt  your  dreams  of  popularity  by  day  and  by 
night,  and  show  its  spectral  form  astride  every  path  of  your 
future  advancement.  The  time  may  not  be  far  distant,  when 
your  repentance  may  be  too  late,  for  lending  your  official 
message  as  an  indorsement  of  all  the  mobs  by  which  your 
administration  has  been  sullied,  by  which  the  dignity  of  the 
State  has  been  dishonored,  which  will  draw  down  upon  you 
the  reproaches  of  an  insulted  people ;  while  you  have  barely 
firmness  to  resist  the  myrmidons  thirsting  for  William's  blood 
in  Alabama,  while  in  effect  you  beg  pardon  of  Governor  Gale 
for  your  refusal  to  deliver  him  up.  You  might  as  well  have 
sent  an  apology  for  not  selling  the  sovereignty  of  the  State, 
as  you  had  conveyed  that  to  the  mobs.  You  can  overlook 
the  insult  done  to  the  sovereignty  of  New  York  by  slave 
States  in  offering  $50,000  to  kidnap  one  of  our  principal  citi- 
zens, and  carry  him  from  his  home  to  be  sacrificed  to  the 
orgies  of  slavery,  in  a  foreign  land.  Such  insults  on  sove- 
reignty as  these,  cannot  draw  forth  a  line  of  reprehension 
from  your  pen. 

Neither  did  you  know  the  State  was  insulted  in  her 
sovereignty,  Avhen  you  saw  50,000  of  your  fellow-citizens 
indicted  under  general  presentments  of  southern  juries, 
charging  your  citizens  to  the  amount  of  four  hundred  so- 
cieties of  abolitionists,  with  the  crimes  of  murder,  robbery, 
arson,  and  holding  them  up  as  objects  of  odium  to  the 
civilized  world.  All  this  you  bear  with  tameness,  permitting 
the  world  to  believe  that  the  State  over  which  you  preside 
has  hundreds  of  organized  societies  who  are  incendiaries,  and 
whose  object  is  to  burn  houses,  cities  and  towns  ;  men  who 
have  made  themselves  obnoxious  to  the  vengeance  of  the 
human  race. 

Do  you  vindicate  them,  and  point  the  world  to  the  Consti- 


84  ALVAN   STEWART. 

tution  and  laws  of  their  country,  which  they  have  never 
violated  ?  No  ;  but  you  are  torturing  your  invention  to 
find  how  an  act  of  an  Abolitionist,  which  is  right  and  consti- 
tutional in  the  State  of  New  York,  because  people  in  other 
States  do  not  like  it,  for  that  cause,  may  be  punished  as 
criminal  here. 

Before  you  can  render  that  criminal  in  Abolitionists,  in 
foreign  States,  which  is  innocent  at  home,  you  must  destroy 
your  Constitution.  What  an  insult  to  New  York  for  Virginia 
to  demand  that  New  York  shall  violate  her  constitution,  and 
turn  the  constitutional  acts  of  her  citizens  into  crimes,  be- 
cause, forsooth,  Virginia  fears  her  own  citizens  in  time  may, 
by  the  force  of  reason  and  discussion,  entertain  the  same 
opinion  as  New  York,  to  wit,  that  slavery  is  wrong.  Hunt 
the  pages  of  legislation  through  the  civilized  world  for  your 
precedent,  and  your  search  will  be  as  hopeless  as  your  object 
is  iniquitous. 

FKEE   SPEECH. 

Farewell  to  liberty,  law  and  un surrendered  individual 
sovereignty,  fenced  by  the  most  solemn  constitutions,  when 
the  citizens  of  New  York  may  not  discuss,  or  print  and 
circulate  their  sentiments  on  any  moral  problem,  or  any 
question  of  right  and  wrong,  of  liberty  or  slavery.  As  well 
might  France  call  on  the  United  States  to  apologize  for  the 
President's  message,  as  for  Virginia  to  call  on  New  York  to 
bow  down  to  slavery  in  apologetic  laws,  in  overthrowing  the 
constitutional  barriers  erected  for  the  defence  of  our  citizens. 
If  we  obey  one  State,  we  ought  in  civility  to  obey  every 
State's  request,  so  that  we  may  have  not  less  than  twenty- 
three  distinct  tracks  marked  out  for  this  State  to  pursue,  or 
twenty-three  masters.  The  State  of  New  York  says,  I  know 
my  citizens  have  violated  no  duty  and  are  acting  within  their 
constitutional  limit ;  but  the  acts  of  my  citizens  are  not 
approved  by  other  States,  and  on  the  principle  of  interme- 


RESPONSE   TO    THE   MESSAGE   OF    GOVERNOR   MARCY.      ~S5 

diate  or  international  law,  to  preserve  peace  and  friendship 
with  my  neighbors,  I  must  take  away  theiv  constitutional 
rights,  and  instead  of  my  being  their  master,  my  neighbors 
are  to  be  their  future  governors,  lords  and  judges.  Virginia 
might  as  well  ask  for  the  title  deeds  to  our  sovereignty,  and 
that  our  citizens  should  sign  a  perpetual  indenture  of  appren- 
ticeship to  her  haughty  State.  The  North  have,  in  paying 
tribute  to  the  word  Union,  consented  to  the  insertion  of  the 
9th  section  of  the  1st  article,  by  which  all  Africa  for  nine- 
teen years  was  made  a  slaughter-yard  for  southern  cupidity  ; 
the  North  yielded  the  three-fifth  slave  representation  ratio 
to  the  threat  of  severance  by  southern  dictation  ;  the  North 
admitted,  Missouri  into  the  Union  as  a  slave  State,  from  the 
boisterous  clamor  of  southern  tyranny,  that  if  the  North  did 
not  yield,  the  Union  should  be  rent;  the  North,  in  1832 
and  1833,  to  the  terrific  cry  of  nullification  and  dissolution, 
sacrificed  one  thousand  millions  of  northern  industry,  capital 
and  property,  in  the  destruction  of  the  American  system,  to 
propitiate  the  slaveholder  and  save  the  Union. 

The  last  demand  now  made  is  under  the  stereotype  threat 
of  dissolving  the  Union,  unless  the  northern  States  legislate 
by  express  direction  of  the  South,  and  destroy  liberty  of 
speech,  discussion,  the  press,  and  thirteen  constitutions  of 
thirteen  States,  in  obedience  to  her  surly  despotism. 

Let  the  non-slaveholding  States  beware  that  they  do  not 
insult  the  spirit  of  the  age,  dishonor  the  memory  ^  of  the 
valiant  dead,  and  make  their  posterity  blush  for  the  craven 
spirit  of  their  ancestors. 

The  time,  sir,  is  at  hand  when  the  non-slaveholding  States 
must  act  in  a  crisis  of  all  that  is  dear  to  our  citizens,  and  will 
prepare  for  the  annals  of  the  historian,  a  page  of  glory  or 
disgrace  ;  and  as  that  page  shall  be  written,  so  will  the  destiny 
of  the  Republic  be  settled  :  if  Slavery  is  in  the  ascendant,  that 
page  will  be  the  Epitaph  of  Liberty. 


ADDRESS  TO  THE  ABOLITIONISTS 

OF  THE  STATE  OF  NEW  YORK. 

As  reported  by  a  Committee  appointed  by  the  first  Annual  Meeting  of  the 
New  York  State  Anti-Slavery  Society,  of  which  Committee.  Alvan  Stewart, 
Esq.,  was  Chairman,  and  which  was  unanimously  adopted,  October,  1836. 

To  rescue  the  helpless,  to  resist  oppression,  to  elevate  the 
despised,  to  combat  despotism,  to  instruct  and  soften  the 
conscience  of  the  master,  to  make  free,  exalt,  enlighten  and  in- 
vigorate the  faculties  of  the  slave,  stand  before  the  world,  as 
the  objects  of  prominent  pursuit  by  the  New  York  State 
Anti-Slavery  Society. 

What  object  so  sublime,  as  that  which  abates  the  sufferings 
of  man  as  a  physical  being,  while  it  amplifies  the  undying 
powers,  makes  the  individual  conscious  of  the  greatness  of 
his  origin,  the  superiority  of  his  heaven-descended  lineage, 
and  his  ultimate  destiny  beyond  the  oppressions  of  time,  and 
the  cruelties  of  a  transitory  world  ? 

What  is  worthy  the  pursuit  of  a  tenant  of  immortality, 
except  that  which  may  place  his  own  body,  and  that  of  his 
neighbor,  in  the  best  attitude  to  have  the  soul  illuminated 
with  the  knowledge  of  itself,  of  its  Author,  its  obligations  to 
itself,  to  man,  and  to  God  ? 

But  the  question  is  asked  every  day,  who  is  my  neighbor  ? 
Every  human  being,  on  whom  the  sun  rises  or  sets,  who  feels 
the  cold  of  winter,  or  the  heat  of  summer,  whether  he  is 
seated  on  the  throne  of  power  or  languishes  in  the  damps  of 
the  dungeon ;  whether  he  is  fed  from  the  table  of  abundance, 
or  eats  his  moldy  crust  under  the  shadow  of  a  wall ;  whether 
he  be  the  owner  of  the  rice,  cotton  and  sugar  fields  of  the 

86 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  87 

sultry  South,  or  the  naked,  scar-marked,  chain-loaded,  whip- 
beaten,  under-fed,  and  unpaid  slave  who  cultivates  them. 

No  matter  where  he  received  his  birth ;  whether  idolatry 
has  forged  its  wretched  chains  for  his  mind,  whether  he  be 
educated  to  lift  his  hand  on  the  solitudes  of  Africa,  to  strip 
others  of  what  they  have ;  no  matter  how  great  the  debase- 
ment of  mind,  even  if  lost  in  the  mazes  of  Confucius'  infidel- 
ity ;  no  matter  how  that  mind  has  been  defiled  by  the  rust 
of  superstition,  in  a  succession  of  ages ;  no  matter  with  what 
fearful  orgies  of  the  midnight  blaze  and  flowing  blood,  the 
sons  of  Christendom  have  robbed  the  black  man  of  himself ; 
no  matter  how  solemn  the  form  by  which  the  planter  of  the 
South,  by  bargain  and  sale,  by  written  instruments  drawn  in 
conformity  to  the  highwayman's  code,  may  make  out  his 
title  (yes,  let  him  show  his  bond  for  human  flesh)  ;  no  mat- 
ter how  bloody  legislation  may  attempt  to  create  title  deeds, 
by  which  man  may  be  sold  to  man  ;  no  matter  hew  solemn 
the  form  of  the  last  will  of  the  dotard,  trembling  on  the  con- 
fines of  the  grave,  who  endeavors  to  bind  to  another  the 
slave  who  has  served  him  through  life's  brief  course;  no 
matter  how  often  he  may  begin  his  will,  "  In  the  name  of 
God,  amen" — (Solemn  mockery!  God-insulting  adjuration! 
Yes,  let  southern  lawyers  bring  their  40,000  recorded  Avills, 
let  us  behold  these  scoffers  now,  in  their  noiseless  graves, 
binding  500,000  human  beings,  to  eternal  slavery,  calling  on 
God  with  an  "amen" — "so  might  it  be,"  to  ratify  what 
might  raise  a  blush  on  a  ruined  archangel's  cheek  ;)  no  mat- 
ter for  all  this  casuistry,  this  network  of  fraud,  this  inversion 
of  truth  ;  no  matter  for  all  these  things,  the  slave  is  still  a 
man,  our  brother,  and  an  inheritor  of  Eternity — he  is  still 
the  man  who  went  down  from  Jerusalem  to  Jericho,  and  fell 
among  thieves  ;  and  this  Society  is  the  Samaritan,  who  will 
take  him  up,  bind  his  wounds,  and  restore  him  to  himself. 
Yes,  if  anything  makes  one  nearer,  and  dearer,  and  more  of 


88  ALVAN   STEWART. 

a  neighbor  than  another,  it  is  because  his  helplessness  and 
misery  demand  it,  and  we  must  obey  the  heavenly  mandate. 
To  enlarge  the  compass  of  action  beyond  the  efforts  of  indi- 
vidual benevolence,  in  behalf  of  the  poor  American  slave,  and 
form  this  Society,  one  year  ago,  brought  together  600  of  the 
choice  spirits  of  this  State,  the  sons  of  humanity,  from  the 
borders  of  Lake  Erie,  the  hills  of  Montauk,  the  mountains  of 
Delaware,  the  waters  of  Champlain,  the  banks  of  the  Hudson, 
and  the  shores  of  Ontario. 

American  Slavery  is  a  pyramid  of  crime — a  death  shade 
thrown  over  this  guilty  land.  Though  we  were  driven  from 
this  temple  of  the  Most  High,  dedicated  to  Him  "  who  is  no 
respecter  of  persons,"  by  a  mob  of  native  Americans — whose 
principles  on  that  occasion,  were  the  same  as  those  taught  in 
the  school  of  Dante,  Marat,  and  Robespierre,  yet  we  have 
reason  to  thank  the  Source  of  all  good,  that  while  these  ene- 
mies of  God  and  man  intended  it  for  our  harm,  it  resulted  in 
our  good,  in  adding  many  thousands  to  our  numbers.  Under 
the  sanction  of  the  principles,  embodied  in  the  constitution 
of  our  Society,  we  are  assembled  in  the  same  house,  a  second 
time,  to  publish  to  our  countrymen,  the  secrets  and  move- 
ments of  our  Society,  with  our  future  intentions.  These  prin- 
ciples and  intentions  are  inscribed  on  the  hearts  of  the  benevo- 
lent, and  make  their  home  in  the  temple  of  eternal  Justice. 
They  are  principles  which  are  not  depending  upon  the  ebul- 
litions of  a  floating,  unthinking  mob,  who  will  shout  hosan- 
nas  to-day,  and  crucifixion  to-morrow;  whose  minds  are 
unfixed  as  the  whirlwind,  one  day  insulting  Heaven  and  dis- 
honoring earth  with  fiendish  shouts  over  prostrate  humanity, 
while  the  next,  they  build  temples  to  canonize  the  ashes  of 
the  victims  they  have  immolated,  and  then  place  in  the 
highest  niche  of  human  remembrance,  that  man  as  philan- 
thropist, when  dead,  who,  when  living,  was  loaded  with 
obloquy,  and  covered  with  reproach.  These  principles  bind 


ADDRESS   TO   THE    ABOLITIONISTS.  89 

in  holy  harmony  a  band  of  philanthropists,  who  deride  the 
scorn  of  the  haughty,  who  love  the  loAvest  being  invested 
with  a  never-dying  mind,  Avho  move  forward  and  upward 
against  the  descending  stream  of  popular  violence,  carrying 
consolation  and  deliverance  to  the  prisoner — unawed  by  the 
bold  front  of  defiance,  but  upheld  and  cheered  by  the  rewards 
of  the  final  judgment ;  when  the  master  and  slave,  the  scorner 
and  the  scorned,  the  oppressor  and  the  oppressed,  shall  stand 
up  for  a  final  analysis  of  character,  before  the  Judge,  at 
whose  presence  the  heavens  and  earth  will  flee  away. 

To  lend  energy  to  truth,  to  give  confidence  to  virtue,  to 
be  numbered  with  the  feeble,  to  take  seats  with  the  humble, 
to  divide  our  substance  with  the  hungry,  never  to  forsake  the 
dumb,  never  to  cease  displaying  the  slave's  wrongs  to  this 
guilty  age,  always  to  continue  haunting  the  imagination  of 
this  slave-grinding  nation,  with  the  crimes  of  the  past,  the 
wickedness  of  the  present,  and  the  accountability  in  the 
future ;  while  at  the  same  time  we  implore  the  Parent  of  the 
Universe  to  hear  the  cries  of  the  millions  of  his  helpless 
children,  which  are  ascending  day  and  night  from  the  slave- 
cursed  fields  of  southern  despotism;  are  objects  lying  near 
our  hearts. 

VIEW    OF    SLAVERY. 

Let  us  take  a  view  of  slavery,  fs  it  appears  in  masses, 
either  for  the  purpose  of  seeing  the  amount  of  robbery  com- 
mitted on  slaves  of  this  land,  as  a  question  of  money;  or  the 
amount  of  brutal  chastisement  inflicted  to  obtain  the  labor 
performed  ;  and  then  let  us  examine  briefly  the  constitutional 
power  of  Congress,  to  abolish  the  internal  American  slave 
trade,  now  prosecuted  with  most  of  the  horrors  which  accom- 
panied the  old  African  slave  trade. 

There  are  at  least  500,000  slaves  in  the  slave  States,  each 
of  whom,  at  the  present  prices  of  produce,  earns,  over  and 


90  ALVAN   STEWART. 

above  his  wretched  subsistence,  $200  per  annum,  or  one 
hundred  millions  of  dollars.  The  other  2,000,000  of  slaves 
we  put  down  as  earning  no  more  than  their  miserable  sub- 
sistence, which  is,  beyond  a  doubt,  greatly  undervaluing 
their  labors.  This  calculation  leaves  the  slaveholders  in  the 
receipt  of  a  net  income  of  one  hundred  millions  of  dollars,  not 
one  dollar  of  which  belongs  to  the  slaveholder,  but  every 
dollar  ought  to  be  the  slaves'.  To- obtain  this  one  hundred 
millions  of  dollars  from  the  poor  slave,  there  are  inflicted  at 
least,  on  an  average,  twenty  lashes  or  blows  on  the  person 
of  each  slave,  which  would  not  be  inflicted  were  they  not 
slaves,  amounting  to  fifty  millions  of  lashes  on  the  two  and 
a  half  millions  of  slaves,  or,  in  other  words,  a  blow  is  struck 
for  every  two  dollars  earned  by  the  slaves.  The  fifty  mil- 
lions of  lashes  is  the  return  the  slaveholder  makes  as  a  com- 
pensation for  the  $100,000,000  earned  for  the  masters  by  the 
poor  slaves. 

The  united  robberies,  piracies,  forgeries,  counter-feit-money- 
passing,  and  thefts  of  the  whole  world  for  one  year,  will  not 
equal  the  sum  of  which  the  American  slaves  are  robbed 
annually.  The  American  slave  has  been  robbed  every  day 
for  200  years  gone  by,  by  a  people  whose  chivalry  consists  in 
the  generosity  of  that  act.  The  fifty  millions  of  lashes  struck 
on  the  American  slaves  (which  would  not  be  if  they  were 
free)  exceed  all  the  acts  of  cruelty  of  the  civilized  and  bar- 
barian world  beside.  Yes,  the  twelve  slave  States  of 
America  are  the  head-quarters  of  cruelty  for  the  world  ;  the 
residence  of  duelling,  the  native  land  of  Lynch  law,  where  its 
professors  reside  and  its  scholars  practise.  These  States  are 
the  asylum  of  piracy,  made  respectable  by  the  sanctions  of 
law,  where  immortal  minds  are  ruined,  in  the  wholesale,  by 
c  onstitutional  edicts ;  where  the  marriage  contract  is  ex 
changed  for  wandering  adultery.  This  is  the  land  dedicated 
to  amalgamation,  where  500,000  mulattoes  testify  the  afiec- 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  91 

tion  and  honorable  love  existing  between  the  master  and  the 
female  slave.  This  is  the  land  where  fathers  sell  children, 
and  brothers  and  sisters  sell  brothers  and  sisters.  This  is  the 
same  land  whose  clergy  have  found  a  curious  edition  of  the 
Bible,  sustaining  these  acts  upon  the  authority  of  Divine 
commands.  These  are  the  lands  where  the  instinct  of  the 
bloodhound  is  improved  by  pursuing,  overtaking  and  revel- 
ling in  human  flesh.  This  is  the  chivalrous  land,  the  inhabi- 
tants of  which,  for  fear  of  insurrection,  are  pillowed  on  guns, 
pistols  and  swords !  Here  are  the  great  man,  woman  and 
child  flesh  markets  of  the  world.  Immortal  souls  are  the 
merchandise  of  the  auction  room.  This  is  the  land  Avhere 
Abolitionists  are  threatened,  defamed,  and  put  to  death  ;  this 
is  the  land  which  threatens  the  dissolution  of  the  con- 
federacy ;  this  is  the  land  of  SLAVES. 

WHAT    HAVE   ABOLITIONISTS    DONE? 

But  it  is  sometimes  asked  what  have  Abolitionists  done  to 
terminate  abuses  so  shocking,  and  outrages  so  insupportable  ? 
If  any  cause  could  excite  self-congratulation,  and  stimulate 
to  noble  and  expanded  exertions  in  behalf  of  the  future,  it  is 
the  cause  of  Abolition.  What  cause  ever  before  in  less  than 
three  years,  in  the  face  of  obloquy,  and  a  nation's  opposition, 
was  found  able  to  organize  between  six  and  seven  hundred 
societies,  comprising  the  most  eleva'ted  piety,  the  warmest 
philanthropy,  the  most  distinguished  talents,  with  untiring 
industry  ? 

In  the  space  of  three  years  the  attention  of  several  State 
legislatures  have  been  awakened.  Almost  a  fifth  of  the 
time  of  the  last  Congress  of  the  nation  was  consumed  in  the 
discussion  of  the  lost  rights  of  the  slave  ;  and  the  gaze  of  the 
world  has  been  fixed  on  this  great  struggle  of  suffering 
humanity. 

If  the  cause  of  Abolition  had  secured  nothing  more  than 


92  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

such  universal  attention,  and  such  formidable  combinations 
for  its  suppression,  it  would  have  been  ground  for  the  most 
devout  thankfulness.  But  this  is  not  all.  The  Abolitionists 
have  measured  swords  with  the  slaveholder  on  several  great 
questions,  in  their  infancy,  with  entire  success. 

SLAVEHOLDERS    FOILED. 

The  slaveholders  of  1835  and  1836,  demanded, 

1st.  An  expression  of  Congress,  that  it  was  unconstitu- 
tional to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  the 
Territories  of  the  nation.  But  the  slaveholders  were  foiled: 
— Congress  refused  to  utter  that  wicked  sentiment ;  and  that 
refusal  is  equivalent  to  a  verdict,  exactly  the  reverse  of  what 
the  slaveholders  insolently  demanded ;  and  it  is  an  ac- 
knowledgment that  Congress  has  the  power  to  abolish  slavery 
in  the  District  and  Territories. 

2d.  That  slaveholders  demanded  that  Congress  should  not 
receive  the  petitions  of  Abolitionists ;  but  Congress  decided 
they  would  receive  them. 

3d.  The  South  asked  Congress  by  law  to  gag  the  press,  by 
a  system  of  espionage  to  confer  on  the  10,000  deputy  post- 
masters a  power  to  peep  and  pry  into  every  secret  that  passed 
through  the  mails,  so  as  to  exclude  all  anti-slavery  written  or 
printed  communications,  from  a  passage  into  the  slave  States. 
But  this  bill  Congress,  after  solemn  deliberation  and  long 
discussion,  refused  to  pass,  but  passed,  in  favor  of  Aboli- 
tionists, a  law,  which  is  the  converse  of  the  slaveholders'  de- 
feated bill.  In  the  32d  section  of  the  new  post-office  law  of 
last  winter,  Congress  has  made  it  a  penalty  not  exceeding 
$500,  and  imprisonment  not  more  than  six  months,  and  a 
removal  from  office,  together  with  a  disqualification  to  hold, 
forever  thereafter,  the  office  of  post-master,  to  delay  any 
letter,  newspaper  or  package,  on  its  passage  to  its  destina- 
tion, or  to  refuse  to  transmit  or  deliver  said  letter,  paper  or 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  93 

package  to  its  proprietor.  This  is  all  Abolitionists  could  ask, 
in  order  to  redress  such  outrages  as  those  at  Charleston  and 
New  York  last  year.  In  fact,  this  law  is  powerful  in  its  con- 
sequences, and  no  postmaster  will  dare  delay  the  passage  or 
delivery  of  the  most  "  violent "  anti-slavery  pamphlet  or 
newspaper  a  single  minute,  short  of  forfeiting  his  office,  and 
subjecting  himself  to  the  penalty  of  a  dungeon. 

No  Abolitionist  could  have  asked  for  a  sterner  law  for  his 
protection  than  Congress  made  in  reply  to  the  slaveholders' 
insolent  demand. 

4th.  The  governors  of  many  of  the  slave  States  loudly  de- 
manded, by  messages  and  special  communications,  directed 
to  the  free  States  of  the  North,  that  the  legislatures  of  these 
States  should  violate  their  own  constitutions,  and  set  at 
naught  their  Magna  Chartas,  and  pass  laws  forbidding  the 
existence  of  Anti-Slavery  Societies,  suppress  speeches  or 
writings  against  slavery.  But  the  free  States  refused  to 
comply  with  one  iota  of  these  demands. 

5th.  Southern  legislatures  have,  by  resolutions,  made  the 
same  request  as  their  governors,  and  met  with  no  better 
success. 

6th.  The  South  have  done  homage  to  the  Abolition  senti- 
ment at  the  North,  by  keeping  their  slaves  at  home  and  not 
insulting  our  feelings  by  their  presence  the  summer  past,  in 
such  numbers  as  formerly.  Two  reasons  have  operated  on 
them  to  do  this:  1st.  They  felt  ashamed  to  acknowledge 
themselves  slaveholders  by  such  palpable  evidence.  2d.  The 
fears  of  the  slave's  escape,  or  that  the  slave  having  been 
brought  here  by  his  master,  would  become  free  the  moment 
he  touched  our  soil.  For  the  law  for  delivering  up  slaves 
applies  to  fugitives,  and  not  to  slaves  brought  here  by  their 
masters  ;  all  of  whom  are  free  the  moment  their  feet  rest 
upon  the  soil  of  any  free  State,  unless  the  slave  is  registered 
according  to  law. 


94:  ALVAN   STEWART. 

7th.  The  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  Massachusetts, 
one  of  the  most  distinguished  courts  for  legal  talent  to  be 
found  in  this  or  any  other  civilized  land,  has  decided,  the  past 
summer,  that  all  slaves  brought  into  that  State  by  their 
masters  become  instantly  free  :  which  proposition  or  decision 
is  equally  true  of  all  the  other  free  States.  If  this  decision  is 
not  correct,  a  slaveholder  might  bring  a  gang  of  slaves  with 
him  here  for  six  months  at  a  time,  and  thus  trample  on  the 
laws  of  the  free  States,  as  well  as  insult  the  feelings  of  all 
good  men.  This  he  cannot  do  without  permission  of  the 
State  given  him  by  law. 

The  decision  of  the  court  of  Massachusetts  will  be  found  to 
be,  with  the  argument  which  supports  it,  an  important  bul- 
wark of  American  liberty.  If  this  decision  be  not  sound  law, 
this  monstrous  consequence  must  follow,  that  a  free  State 
would  allow  a  foreigner  or  a  citizen  of  another  State,  privi- 
leges denied  to  its  own  citizens. 

It  has  always  been  considered  in  the  law  of  nations,  that 
great  comity  was  shown  the  citizen  of  another  State,  if  he 
was  put  on  an  equal  footing  with  the  citizens  of  the  country 
whose  hospitality  he  enjoyed  ;  but  to  allow  a  Virginian  to  be 
followed  by  a  train  of  trembling  slaves,  to  this  State,  would 
be  not  only  to  place  that  individual  above  our  own  citizens, 
but  also  above  the  laws  and  institutions  of  the  State  itself. 
But  as  self-evident  as  this  proposition  seems,  its  assertion  at 
this  tune,  from  so  high  a  source,  cannot  but  be  regarded  as 
one  of  the  most  cheering  evidences  in  favor  of  the  principles 
of  abolition  and  humanity ;  and,  in  fact,  as  one  of  the  great 
landmarks  in  the  career  of  universal  emancipation. 

The  year  1836  will  ever  be  remembered  as  a  year  in 
which  Christian  philanthropists  in  Great  Britain  extended 
their  noble  hands  to  our  aid,  in  the  most  dignified  expressions 
of  kindness  and  sympathy.  We  cannot  but  regard  the 
friendship  of  the  great,  the  good,  and  the  powerful  in 


ADDRESS   TO   THE    ABOLITIONISTS.  95 

England,  at  this  time,  as  one  of  the  most  cheering  circum- 
stances to  arouse  the  desponding,  and  sustain  the  true-hearted, 
amidst  the  persecutions  of  sla\eholders,  or  the  insults  of  their 
apologists.  Nothing  has  more  employed  the  attention  of 
good  men  in  England,  the  summer  past,  than  in  learning  the 
nature  and  horrors  of  American  slavery.  To  such  a  point  of 
detestation  has  the  slaveholder  sunk  in  English  estimation, 
that  it  is  believed  none  of  the  first  men  of  the  southern  States, 
who  are  slaveholders,  would  be  admitted  into  good  English 
society,  where  the  fact  Avas  knoAvn,  any  sooner  than  persons 
who  were  smugglers,  or  engaged  in  the  African  slave  trade. 

We  should  be  much  surprised,  if  the  same  course  of  treat- 
ment in  coming  years  should  not  be  pursued  by  the  best  class 
of  society  in  the  free  States  toward  the  slaveholders. 

It  may  be  laid  down,  as  indisputable,  from  the  foregoing 
statements,  that  the  slaveholders  have  been  driven  from  every 
position  they  endeavored  to  occupy,  and  routed  most  disgrace- 
fully, on  their  own  chosen  field  of  battle.  Yes,  they  have 
been  beaten  at  all  points,  from  their  high-handed  and  wicked 
attempts  to  cut  off  the  slave's  chance  of  escape  from  his 
chains. 

SOUTHERN   CHTVALKY. 

Perhaps  it  is  wrong  not  to  award  what  is  even  due  to  a 
chivalrous  slaveholder.  It  must  not  be  denied,  and  justice 
compels  us  to  admit,  that  sixty  slaveholders  in  Tennessee,  in 
the  summer  of  1835,  did  surround,  take,  and  arrest  Amos 
Dresser,  an  Abolitionist — a  harmless,  talented  young  man, 
travelling  through  that  State — and  whipped  him  twenty  lashes 
on  the  naked  back,  because  he  was  a  member  of  an  Abolition 
Society  in  Ohio,  and  then  banished  him  from  the  State.  The 
chivalrous  citizens  of  the  State  of  Georgia,  in  the  year  1836, 
surrounded,  waylaid,  and  took  a  Mr.  Kitchell,  a  citizen  of 
New  Jersey,  a  pious  youth,  a  recent  graduate  of  the  Theolo- 


96  A.LVAN    STEWART. 

gical  Seminary  at  Princeton,  travelling  in  the  South,  on 
account  of  infirm  health,  upon  the  suspicion  of  being  an 
Abolitionist  (which  it  is  since  understood  he  was  not)  and 
tarred,  feathered,  and  violently  beat  him,  and  expelled  him 
from  the  State.  Thus  we  see  how  glorious  the  laurels  of 
chivalry  appear  in  the  victories  won  on  the  fields  of  Ten- 
nessee in  1835,  and  the  no  less  auspicious  campaign  which 
filled  the  cup  of  Georgia's  renown  in  1836. 

The  slaveholder  the  summer  past,  has  been  following  his 
usual  chivalrous  pursuits — the  recapturing  of  fugitive  slaves 
in  the  free  States — and  in  some  instances  has  been  successful 
in  reducing  to  a  second  bondage,  those  who  had  been  beyond 
chains  and  whips  ten  and  fifteen  years,  by  the  aid  of  those  sup- 
ple instruments  of  tyranny — the  well  paid  constable  and  jus- 
tice of  peace,  whose  consciences  are  more  alive  to  an  obedience 
to  the  requisition  of  the  act  of  Congress  for  retaking  fugitive 
slaves,  than  they  are  to  the  loudest  calls  of  humanity.  Yes, 
had  the  slave  the  same  sum  of  money  to  pay  the  magistrate 
and  constable  for  his  escape,  which  the  master  pays  for  his 
judicial  kidnapping,  few  fugitive  slaves  would  ever  cross 
Mason  &  Dixon's  line  a  second  tune. 

Let  the  finger  of  this  world's  scorn  be  pointed  to  that  officer, 
judicial  or  ministerial,  who  shall  lend  himself  to  the  slave- 
holder to  reduce  a  man  a  second  time  to  bondage,  who  will 
for  the  slaveholder's  gold  basely  convert  the  writ  of  habeas 
corpus,  the  slave's  passport  to  freedom,  into  a  writ  of  eternal 
imprisonment,  by  which  a  slave  is  taken  from  the  custody 
of  himself  and  equal  laws,  and  delivered  to  an  enraged  and 
laAvless  master,  from  whom  death  can  only  discharge  him. 

COLOR   I2f  A   QUANDARY. 

The  amalgamation  compound  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  and  Afri- 
can blood  adds  annually  15,000  human  beings  to  the  slave 
population,  in  the  shape  of  mulattoes,  as  a  triumph  on  the  part 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  97 

of  the  slaveholder  over  the  supposed  dignity  of  the  white  man, 
by  making  an  intermediate  landmark  between  the  extreme 
castes. 

The  slaveholder  talks  of  sending  the  manumitted  slave  to 
Africa  as  the  land  of  his  origin.  What  will  he  do  with  the 
mulattoes  ?  Upon  that  principle,  the  poor  mulatto  must 
spend  one  year  in  Africa,  and  then  one  year  in  England,  Ire- 
land, Scotland,  France,  Germany,  or  whereever,  in  Europe, 
the  ancestor  of  his  white  American  father  came  from ;  so  this 
compound  of  Europe  and  Africa  must  spend  his  life  in  a  per- 
petual pilgrimage,  in  going  from  one  continent  to  another, 
dividing  and  spending  the  remainder  of  his  existence  in  the 
pursuit  of  the  countries  of  his  ancestor's  origin.  In  fact,  if 
the  friends  of  the  argument  of  hunting  up  the  countries  of 
remote  origin  of  one's  race,  should  think  it  too  inconvenient 
for  the  mulatto,  perhaps  their  humanity  might  be  induced  to 
allow  them  some  intermediate  island,  as  a  half-way  house,  where 
they  might  rest  themselves  equidistant  from  ancestral  origin. 

But  what  mulatto  in  the  United  States,  who  has  come  to 
the  years  of  discretion,  but  has  pitied  the  mother  slave,  who 
bore  him,  and  cursed  his  white  father.  Yes,  cursed  him  for 
his  or  her  existence ;  cursed  him  for  giving  him  a  body  to 
ruin  a  soul ;  cursed  him  for  this  body  in  which  the  immortal 
soul  withers !  Oh  !  might  the  mulatto  slave  cry  out,  "  what ! 
can  I  thank  my  white  father  for  a  body,  which  is  not  my  own, 
which  is  but  a  thing !  thank  him  for  that  body  which  is 
exposed  to  every  indignity,  blows  and  abuse.  Thank  him  for 
that  body  wrhich  my  father,  my  brothers  or  my  sisters,  my 
nephews,  nieces  and  even  my  grandfather,  may  sell  under  the 
auction  hammer  to  pay  the  debts  or  buy  bread-stuffs  for 
members  of  the  church,  in  the  land  of  chivalry.  Shall  my 
father  eat  me  indirectly  by  consuming  what  is  given  for  me  in 
exchange  on  a  sale  of  my  body?  Strange  Christianity! 
which  can  uphold  such  practices  as  Lhese  !" 
5 


98  ALVAN   STEWART. 


SLAVEHOLDERS    UNJIASKED. 

The  Abolitionists  of  the  year  1836  have  compelled  the 
slaveholder  to  unmask  himself  and  show  the  world  his  insin- 
cere heart,  while  heretofore  he  professed  to  regard  slavery  as 
an  evil,  and  wished  it  might  come  to  an  end.  This,  they 
admit  now  to  be  false,  and  that  they  regard  slavery  as  a 
blessing,  and  the  substratum  of  the  social  edifice ;  as  desira- 
ble for  its  own  sake,  and  the  best  state  of  things  of  which  the 
nature  of  human  institutions  admit,  and  they  intend  to  perpe- 
tuate these  blessings  to  future  generations,  securing  their  con- 
tinuance to  the  end  of  the  world. 

THE   UNION   DISSOLVED. 

The  slaveholders  have  dissolved  the  Union  so  far  as  the 
100,000  Abolitionists  are  concerned.  No  Abolitionist,  how- 
ever distinguished  he  may  be  in  the  circles  of  learning,  piety, 
talents,  or  philanthropy,  can  place  his  foot  on  slavery's  soil. 
If  he  does,  he  sinks  below  the  slave,  into  the  grave,  by  the 
hands  of  lawless  violence.  All  law  is  powerless  in  his 
defence.  The  Abolitionist  stands  alone.  The  federal  com- 
pact yields  no  relief.  The  slaveholders  rush  upon  him  with 
the  ferocity  of  savage  demons,  and  lynch  him  into  eternity. 
This  is  the  natural  fruit  of  slavery. 

CONTINUED  PIRACY. 

The  same  brute  force,  which  the  forefathers  of  the  present 
proprietors  of  slaves  employed  in  the  forests  of  Africa,  at  the 
dread  hour  of  midnight,  to  reduce  the  slave  to  possession,  is 
now  used  by  their  chivalrous  descendants  to  maintain  their 
jurisdiction  over  the  descendants  of  the  kidnapped  Afri- 
can. 

The  abolition  of  the  old  African  slave  trade  was  accom- 
plished by  the  passage  of  six  different  acts  of  Congress,  from 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  99 

ISO?  to  1824,  by  which  every  succeeding  act  increased  the 
penalty  for  bringing  a  person  into  this  country  to  make  him 
a  slave,  until  the  punishment  was  death — the  pirate's  doom. 
The  internal  slave  trade  between  the  several  States  in  this 
country  violates  the  same  principles  of  justice  and  humanity 
which  were  violated  by  the  old  African  slave  trade,  now 
abolished  under  the  penalty  of  death. 

"What  is  more  plain  than  the  remedy  for  this  glaring 
atrocity  ? 

POWERS    OF    CONGRESS — INTERNAL   SLAVE   TRADE. 

The  same  words,  clauses  and  sections  of  the  Constitution, 
which  gave  Congress  the  power  to  abolish  the  African  slave 
trade,  give  Congress  the  ability  to  pass  a  law  to  abolish  the 
internal  slave  trade  now  carried  on  between  the  slave  States, 
in  defiance  of  the  loudest  cries  of  humanity. 

Congress  has  power  given  it  by  the  Constitution  to  regu- 
late the  commerce  between  the  several  States.  What  com- 
merce can  be  of  so  high  a  character,  or  so  important  in  its 
consequences,  as  a  traffic  in  human  beings  to  the  amount  of 
more  than  120,000  persons  annually?  More  than  double  the 
amount  ever  imported  from  Africa  before  the  abolition  of  the 
slave  trade,  amounting,  in  value,  from  fifty  to  sixty  millions 
of  dollars  annually. 

Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  and  the  western 
parts  of  North  and  South  Carolina,  grow  negroes  as  an 
article  of  traffic  for  the  more  southern  States. 

In  fact,  these  States  are  supposed  to  receive  as  much 
money  from  abroad  for  their  negroes  sold  to  go  out  of  their 
States,  as  for  all  other  products  exported  besides. 

FOREIGN   SLAVE  TRADE. 

Let  that  same  principle  of  humanity  be  the  guiding  genius 
of  American  councils,  and  abolish  the  slave  trade  between 


100  ALVAN   STEWART. 

the  States,  which  smote  with  uplifted  and  powerful  hand,  the 
slave  trade  with  Africa,  and  slavery  itself  would  die  a  natural 
death  from  its  own  oppressive  weight  in  the  slave-selling 
States,  while  the  abounding  soils  of  the  far  South  must,  two- 
thirds  of  them,  be  cultivated  by  freemen  or  lie  waste. 

FOREIGN    SLAVE    TRADE    COMPARED    WITH    THE   DOMESTIC. 

Did  the  South  vote  to  abolish  the  slave  trade  with  Africa  for 
the  meretricious  purpose  of  monopolizing  the  slave  market  of 
the  world,  and  creating  one  on  the  American  soil,  transcend- 
ing in  the  annals  of  its  cruelty,  all  that  Clarkson  or  Wilber- 
force  has  told  of  Africa's  desolations  ?  Is  it  so !  Were 
northern  statesmen  and  philanthropists  sleeping  at  their 
posts  in  allowing  the  southern  States  for  twenty  years  after 
the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  to  ransack  the  coasts  and 
interior  of  Africa,  and  tear  from  her  her  affrighted  and 
screaming  sons  and  daughters,  to  turn  them  into  slaves, 
merely  as  seed,  to  lay  and  spread  a  broad  foundation 
for  a  future  slave  trade  on  the  shores  of  America?  Is 
all  this  seeming  repentance  for  the  wrongs  done  ill-fated 
Africa,  by  which  our  laws  inhibit  the  importation  of  slaves 
under  the  penalty  of  death  and  the  pirate's  fate,  a  mere 
bubble,  a  device  of  trade,  amounting  to  prohibition  from 
abroad,  to  increase  the  value  of  a  trade  of  the  same  descrip- 
tion at  home  ?  Has  the  slave  trade  of  Africa  been  banished 
under  a  scale  of  ascending  penalties,  terminating  in  a  pirate's 
death,  barely  to  introduce  a  slave  trade  into  America,  the 
victims  of  which,  in  part,  are  the  sons  and  daughters  of  white 
men,  and  thus  make  white  blood  and  black  blood  share  the 
terrors  of  the  American  domestic  slave  trade,  vastly  exceed- 
ing in  point  of  numbers,  annually,  those  imported  from 
Africa,  in  any  one  year,  from  1789  to  1808  ?  And  inasmuch 
as  the  slaves  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky,  Tennessee, 
and  the  mountain  parts  of  the  two  Carolinas,  are  better 


ADDKESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  101 

informed  and  cultivated  in  their  knowledge  of  right  and 
wrong,  than  the  nations  of  Africa,  by  so  much  the  more  are 
their  sufferings  increased,  in  being  torn  from  their  natal  soil 
and  the  relatives  they  have,  than  the  less  informed  children 
of  Africa. 

HOKKOKS    OF  THIS  TRAFFIC. 

The  slave  has  no  interest  in  property  or  things,  or  in  the 
soil.  His  whole  earthly  interest  is  in  the  love  and  sympathy 
of  his  relations,  and  in  the  beings  for  whom  he  has  formed 
strong  attachments  in  his  youthful  days.  Therefore  he  is  by 
a  removal  from  those  places  where  he  was  raised,  and  in 
severing  all  the  bonds  that  make  life  supportable,  doubly 
robbed — always  of  himself,  and  lastly  of  his  friends  and  rela- 
tions. The  only  objects  that  rendered  him  able  to  bear  the 
burden  of  life,  are  taken  from  him  by  this  awful  traffic.  Hun- 
dreds commit  suicide  every  year,  and  rush  into  the  next 
world,  being  stripped  of  everything  in  this  by  which  life 
might  be  sustained.  The  slave  has  nothing  but  what  exists 
in  the  social  affections ;  strip  him  of  those  objects,  and  his 
misery  must  be  perfect — his  agony  helpless.  No  man  can 
tell  the  story  of  such  bereavement,  who  has  not  been  torn  as 
a  slave  from  the  soil  where  he  was  born,  to  bid  an  eternal 
farewell  to  all  his  friends  and  relations — the  only  property  or 
interest  he  possesses  (if  so  it  may  be  called)  on  this  earth*.  He 
is  never  permitted  to  revisit  those  friends  to  whom  he  can 
never  write.  An  impassable  gulf  separates  them  !  No.  He 
parts  with  all  he  loves  at  once,  forever,  never  to  be  renewed 
on  the  shores  of  time ;  not  for  his  own  interest,  not  for  a 
noble  act  of  benevolence.  No.  He  goes  to  wear  out  his 
life  for  another,  as  a  slave  under  the  whip,  for  that  man  who 
never  thanks  him  for  his  labor,  but  rewards  him  with  hunger, 
nakedness,  stripes,  sorrow  and  contempt,  till  the  grave,  pity- 
ing him,  takes  and  forever  shelters  in  its  bosom  the  son  of 


102  ALVAN   STEWART. 

toil,  misery,  insult  and  pain.  It  is  said,  not  less  than 
120,000  are  taken  annually  from  the  northern  slave  States  to 
the  far  South. 

EFFECTS   OF   COLONIZING. 

Every  attempt  by  the  South  to  aid  the  Colonization  So- 
ciety, to  send  free  colored  people  to  Africa,  enhances  the  value 
of  the  slave  left  on  the  soil.  By  sending  off  free  colored 
people  to  Africa,  there  is  no  competition  with  the  slave  on  the 
soil,  for  the  purpose  of  labor.  The  slaveholder  controls  the 
entire  sinews  of  labor  by  his  own  will,  and  can  fix  his  own 
price.  If  there  were  free  colored  persons  to  hire  themselves 
out  on  the  plantations  of  Louisiana,  Alabama,  Mississippi  and 
Arkansas,  the  slaveholders  of  Virginia,  and  the  other  slave- 
growers,  would  find  a  competitor  in  those  sugar  and  cotton 
States,  in  the  free  laborer,  whom  the  slaveholders  are  desirous 
of  removing,  that  they  may  sell  their  slaves. 

•      IMPORTANCE   OF   ABOLISHING  THIS   TRAFFIC. 

But  let  the  internal  slave  trade  be  abolished,  and  slavery 
would  come  to  an  end  by  its  own  weight,  in  Virginia,  Mary- 
land, Kentucky,  Tennessee,  and  the  western  parts  of  North 
and  South  Carolina.  These  countries,  in  which  Americans 
are  grown  for  the  internal  slave  trade  (shameless  trade!), 
if  these  slave-growers  could  not  send  their  surplus  Americans 
abroad,  and  sell  them  at  great  prices,  would  sink  under  the 
weight  of  a  population  whom  their  old  exhausted  slave  soil 
could  never  support.  And  they  would  be  compelled  to 
manumit  their  colored  people  from  necessity,  if  they  were 
forbidden  under  penalties,  such  as  are  inflicted  on  those  in 
the  slave  trade  with  Africa,  from  sending  them  out  of  the 
State,  or  Territory,  or  district  where  the  slaves  happened  to 
be.  The  far  South  would  be  compelled  to  abandon  slave 
labor  and  employ  free  colored  people,  in  a  great  degree,  if 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  103 

they  could  no  longer  import  slaves  from  abroad  to  supply  the 
havoc  created  by  overworking,  underfeeding,  and  an  un- 
healthy climate. 

Again,  slavery  never  can  be  abolished  in  the  District  of 
Columbia  or  the  Territories,  with  any  expectation  of  advan- 
tage, until  the  internal  slave  trade  is  abolished  between  the 
States.  For  the  moment  the  slaveholder  in  the  District  of 
Columbia,  or  in  the  Territories,  perceived  that  a  law  was 
about  to  be  passed  for  the  aboh'tion  of  slavery  in  the  District 
or  Territories,  before  such  a  law  could  be  passed,  the  District 
of  Columbia  or  the  Territories  would  be  stripped  of  their 
slaves,  who  would  be  sent  off  in  coffles  and  sold  at  auction  in 
some  of  the  slave  States.  Thus  it  becomes  every  way  impor- 
tant that  Congress  should  exercise  its  unquestionable  consti- 
tutional power,  and  restrain  the  "  migration  "  of  slaves  from 
one  State,  one  district,  or  one  Territory,  to  another,  under 
the  heaviest  penalties,  such  as  would  be  obeyed. 

THE   CONSTITUTION". 

The  fourth  clause  of  the  eighth  section  of  the  first  ai'ticle 
of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  says,  that  Congress 
shall  have  power  "  to  regulate  commerce  with  foreign  nations, 
and  among  the  several  States,  and  with  the  Indian  Tribes." 

The  first  clause  of  the  ninth  section  of  the  first  article  of 
the  Constitution  says  that  "the  migration  or  importation  of 
such  persons  as  any  of  the  States  now  existing  shall  think 
proper  to  admit,  shall  not  be  prohibited  by  the  Congress 
prior  to  the  year  1808,  but  a  tax  or  duty  may  be  imposed  on 
such  importation,  not  exceeding  $10  for  each  person." 

The  authority  to  abolish  the  domestic  slave  trade  between 
the  States,  is  derived  from  the  fourth  clause  of  the  eighth 
section  above  cited ;  and  the  prohibition  of  the  exercise  of 
the  power  of  Congress,  by  the  Constitution,  until  1808,  by  the 
ninth  section  of  the  same  article  (which  alludes  to  the  question 


104:  ALVAN   STEWART. 

of  slavery  alone),  is  conclusive  evidence  that  the  framers  of 
the  Constitution  itself,  understood  the  power  to  be  conferred 
by  the  fourth  clause  of  the  eighth  section,  or  else  the  prohi- 
bition of  the  exercise  of  this  power,  in  the  ninth  section,  until 
1808,  would  have  been  useless.  For  it  is  a  principle  of  con- 
struction admitted,  that  a  power  to  do  an  act  cannot  be 
raised  by  implication,  from  any  clause  of  the  Constitution, 
unless  it  become  necessary  to  exert  that  power  by  legislation 
to  carry  into  effect  some  acknowledged  power  of  the  Consti- 
tution. Therefore,  the  Constitution  construes  the  eighth 
section  "  to  regulate  commerce  with  foreign  nations,  and 
among  the  several  States,"  as  being  a  source  of  authority  by 
which  Congress  might  abolish  the  foreign  slave  trade,  and 
also  the  internal  slave  trade  amongst  the  States.  But  it  may 
be  urged  that  a  power  to  regulate  commerce,  does  not  carry 
with  it  a  power  to  destroy  it.  This  objection  has  often  been 
raised,  but  always  overruled  by  the  decision,  that  a  power  to 
regulate  commerce  is  the  same  as  a  power  to  create  and 
destroy,  to  make  or  unmake,  and  therefore  Congress,  under 
the  power  to  regulate  commerce  with  foreign  nations  or 
among  the  States,  has  power  to  abolish  any  particular  traffic 
or  commerce,  which  Congress  believes  to  be  unprofitable  to 
the  nation,  or  disgraceful  to  its  humanity.  Congress,  in  six 
distinct  acts,  from  1808  to  1824,  passed  for  the  abolition  and 
utter  extinction  of  the  African  slave  trade,  has  acknowledged 
the  construction  now  contended  for,  that  a  power  to  regulate 
is  a  power  to  alter,  change,  modify,  abolish  or  annihilate. 
Unless  this  proposition  be  time,  these  acts  abolishing  the 
African  slave  trade  would  be  unconstitutional  and  void,  as 
well  as  a  host  of  other  statutes  deriving  their  power  from  the 
same  source.  Congress  has  power,  under  the  word  "  regu- 
late," utterly  to  annihilate  commerce  with  a  particular  nation, 
by  embargoes,  acts  of  perpetual  non-intercourse,  and,  finally, 
by  open  war,  which  is  the  end  of  all  commercial  relations. 


ADDRESS   TO   THE    ABOLITIONISTS.  105 

It  may  be  inquired,  how  can  the  traffic,  or  commerce 
amongst  the  States,  or  between  one  State  and  another  in  rela- 
tion to  slaves,  be  regulated  ?  In  the  first  place,  the  States  as 
between  two  or  more  of  them  have  no  power  by  treaty  or 
legislation,  to  regulate  this  matter,  as  long  as  slavery  is  per- 
mitted in  those  States ;  for  Virginia  cannot  pass  a  law  that 
a  man  from  Maryland  importing  a  slave  from  Maryland,  shall 
be  subject  to  a  penalty  of  $500,  or  three  years  imprisonment, 
or  that  the  slave  ipso  facto,  by  having  been  brought  from 
Maryland  to  Virginia  should  be  free.  Because  the  citizens 
of  Maryland  might  cite  the  2d  section  of  the  4th  article  of 
the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  in  which  it  is  declared 
"  that  the  citizens  of  each  State  shall  be  entitled  to  all  the 
privileges  and  immunities  of  citizens  in  the  several  States," 
which  the  State  of  Virginia  cannot  overthrow. 

In  subjecting  a  Marylander  to  forfeiture,  loss  of  liberty,  or 
any  other  penalty  in  Virginia,  for  importing  his  slaves  with 
himself,  would  be  a  course  of  treatment  shown  to  the  Mary- 
lander,  not  recognized  by  Virginia  toward  her  own  citizens, 
for  having  slaves  in  their  possession ;  the  law  would  be  uncon- 
stitutional and  void,  as  the  law  of  a  State.  If  the  individual 
States  have  not  power  to  prevent  the  slave's  migrating  by 
command  of  the  master  from  one  State  to  another,  it  would 
follow,  unless  Congress  has  jurisdiction  of  the  subject  matter, 
that  the  internal  slave  trade  among  the  States  must  be  beyond 
the  reach  of  the  individual  States  or  the  power  of  Congress. 
This  is  an  absurdity,  which  we  are  not  prepared  to  believe  or 
adopt,  that  a  subject  so  fraught  with  abuses,  at  the  horrors  of 
which  the  civilized  world  might  grow  pale — should  have  placed 
itself  beyond  federal  or  State  legislation.  The  motives  which 
appeared  to  influence  the  passage  of  the  six  different  laws  to 
abolish  the  African  slave  trade,  were  the  irrepressible  gushmgs 
of  our  common  humanity  in  favor  of  the  suffering  slave,  torn 
from  his  native  land  and  sold  into  hopeless  captivity.  No 


106  ALVAN   STEWART. 

interest  but  general  humanity,  prompted  the  legislation  which 
forever  shut  down  the  hatchway  on  that  bloody  trade.  Hu- 
manity now  cries  aloud — she  goes  in  our  streets — she  weeps 
and  howls  on  our  highways — she  knocks  at  the  door  of  public 
feeling  till  her  locks  are  wet  with  the  cold  dews  of  night — she 
goes  across  the  ocean — she  pleads  not  in  vain  for  friends  to  fly 
to  the  rescue — she,  through  England,  has  sent  back  her  indig- 
nant voice  like  the  sound  of  many  waters,  to  fall  on  the  guilty 
slaveholder's  ear  in  America. 

Motives  and  reasons  for  abolishing  the  slave  trade 
between  the  States  are  greater,  as  far  as  the  question  of 
humanity  is  concerned,  than  in  the  old  slave  trade.  No 
doubt  there  are  twice  as  many  groans,  sighs  and  agonies  felt, 
suffered  and  endured  from  the  American  slave  trade  among 
the  States,  as  were  felt  by  the  slaves  brought  from  Africa-  to 
the  United  States  in  any  oce  year,  between  1789  and  1808. 

Yes,  two  persons,  at  least,  suffer  the  horrors  of  migra- 
tion from  one  State  to  another,  where  one  suffered  by  impor- 
tation, from  the  coasts  of  Africa  to  the  United  States.  The 
word  "  migration  "  employed  in  the  first  clause  of  the  ninth 
section  of  the  first  article,  is  significant  indeed,  and  means 
nothing  more  nor  less  than  going  from  one  State  to  another, 
not  from  one  part  of  a  State  to  another  ;  not  coming  from  a 
foreign  country  beyond  sea,  that  would  be  met  by  the  other 
word  "importation"  which  the  abolition  of  the  African 
slave  trade  undertook  to  prevent,  in  the  six  statutes  passed 
for  its  abolition. 

CONCLUSION. 

It  is  firmly  believed,  that,  were  a  rigorous  law  passed 
by  Congress,  forbidding  the  internal  slave  trade  between  the 
States,  it  would  be  equivalent  to  the  manumission  on  the  soil 
of  two-thirds  of  the  slaves  in  the  United  States  in  less  than 
ten  years. 


ADDRESS   TO   THE   ABOLITIONISTS.  107 

It  is  therefore  earnestly  desired,  that  every  anti-slavery 
society,  or  individual  who  may  petition  Congress  on  the 
subject,  may  make  the  annihilation  of  the  domestic,  or  inter- 
nal slave  trade  between  the  States,  a  point  of  the  most  promi- 
nent importance,  and  pray  for  its  entire  ABOLITION. 


EXTRACTS. 

SLAVERY      ARRAIGNED. 

THE  slave  still  groans,  humanity  weeps,  the  helpless  yet 
implore.  We  are  in  the  midst  of  the  greatest  moral  battle 
ever  fought  by  Mercy,  pleading  against  intelligent  and 
vigilant  villainy.  The  Abolitionists  are  the  organ  of  national 
compassion,  and  are  making  up  the  dreadful  issue  between 
criminality  enthroned  upon  laws,  and  justice  beleagured  by 
the  myrmidons  of  robbery.  We  have  arraigned  the  greatest 
criminal  ever  summoned  to  the  bar  of  Divine  and  human 
reason,  the  triers  of  whom  are  the  good  and  the  just  of  this 
and  all  ages,  and  the  verdict  is  written  and  pronounced  by 
the  Saviour  of  the  world,  who  is  the  Foreman  of  this  grand 
inquest,  and  brings  in  the  verdict  of  guilty,  while  the  Uni- 
verse cries,  "Amen."  It  has  been  the  undertaking  of  Anti- 
Slavery  men,  for  many  years  past,  to  make  the  men  of  this 
generation  understand  and  believe  that  such  is  the  rendered 
verdict  of  Divine  as  well  as  human  wisdom.  One  half  of  this 
besotted  nation  denied  the  existence  of  such  a  verdict,  while 
a  vast  portion  of  the  other  half  folded  their  arms,  and  said, 
"  If  there  was  such  a  verdict,  the  criminal  had  the  power  to 
nullify  it ;  and  if  the  criminal  saw  fit  to  call  the  verdict  of 
'  guilty '  an  acguital,  by  a  law  of  his  own,  ichy  that  made  it 
so  /" 

REFORMERS   MALIGNED. 

We,  perhaps,  have  encountered  more  obstacles  than  have 
often  been  presented  to  a  band  of  Reformers.  The  politi- 
cal power  of  the  country  having  been  claimed  and  wielded 
by  two  great  parties,  nearly  balanced,  we  might  have 

108 


EXTRACTS.  109 

reasoned,  in  ordinary  cases,  that  if  one  party  persecuted  us, 
the  other  would  have  protected  us ;  but,  no,  the  party  to 
which  we  might  flee,  felt  that  it  had  more  to  lose,  in  the 
estimation  of  slaveholders,  than  they  could  gain  by  our  votes, 
and  each  party  run  a  race,  to  the  top  of  their  speed,  against 
us,  and  the  one  which  could  shout  our  condemnation  the 
loudest  was  supposed  to  be  nearest  the  goal  of  its  ambition. 
In  fact,  the  weight  of  our  vote  was  nothing,  as  compared 
with  the  disgrace  of  our  alliance.  Both  parties  scouted  us  ; 
the  mobs  howled  around  our  conventions,  and  pursued  us  to 
our  homes ;  the  churches,  in  their  aggregate  capacity,  refused 
to  acknowledge  that  we  had  found  truth ;  but  all  parties, 
religious  or  political,  in  power  or  out,  the  women-whippers, 
the  man  owners,  and  their  apologists,  the  mobs,  the  Pharisee 
and  Saducee,  the  sinner  and  publican,  the  drunkard  and 
debauchee,  formed  one  grand  line,  standing  shoulder  to 
shoulder,  deriding  our  arguments,  jeering  at  our  philan- 
thropy, traducing  the  slave,  mocking  his  sorrow,  defaming 
truth  and  libelling  Omnipotence,  until  the  civilized  world  was 
shocked  by  the  impurity  of  our  sentiments,  and  the  violence 
of  our  actions. 

LIBERTY'S  IMPEBIAL  GUAED. 

Good  men  will  be  willing  to  spend  and  be  spent,  and 
work  in  our  conventions,  prepare  resolutions,  advocate  them, 
write  tracts  and  scatter  them,  notify  meetings  and  attend 
them,  print  votes  and  distribute  them,  give  money  and  time, 
and  stand  up  for  the  slave  on  the  bridge  or  in  the  boat,  in 
the  car  or  the  stage,  in  the  pulpit  or  the  press,  at  the  fire- 
side or  the  ballot  box.  These  men  will  cany  your  reforma- 
tion through  ;  they  will  not  lead  you  in  sight  of  the  promised 
land,  and  at  last  advise  you  that  the  Constitution  is  in  the 
way,  and  that  you  had  better  go  back  into  Egypt  and 
acknowledge  Pharaoh's  jurisdiction,  and  go  to  making 


110  ALVAN   STEWART. 

bricks,  raising  onions,  and  weeding  garlics ;  nor  would  they 
advise  you  to  die  in  the  wilderness  for  fear  of  those  huge 
Anakims,  and  for  the  sake  of  saving  the  expense  of  a  grave- 
yard. 

DOUGH-FACES. 

"We  shall  conquer ;  we  shall  perform  the  mighty  work. 
The  world  is  coming  to  our  side.  Let  those  who  are  dis- 
couraged be  sent  home  on  an  everlasting  furlough  to  the 
Whigs  and  Democrats,  and  there  let  them  live  and  die,  con- 
templating the  beautiful  mysteries  of  coicardice,  and  the 
essential  attributes  of  the  meanest  position  fiver  occupied  by 
man. 

SYCOPHANCY   INVADES   THE   COLLEGE. 

The  professor  in  our  northern  college  respectfully  ap- 
proaches the  young  heir  of  a  hundred  negroes,  and  with  his 
hat  under  his  arm,  and  humble  genuflections,  timidly  inquires, 
when  it  will  be  convenient  for  him  to  receive  an  idea  ? 

THE   GREEN   MOUNTAIN   STATE. 

"We  slept  at  Manchester,  and  passed  over  the  Green 
Mountains  near  this  place,  through  one  of  those  notches  the 
Great  Creator  left  for  a  passage  of  his  creatures  from  one 
side  to  the  other.  It  would  be  strange  if  Vermont,  the  rocks 
of  whose  eternal  mountains  are  yet  red  with  the  blood  of  the 
war  of  independence,  the  war  for  human  rights,  should 
have  been  found  throwing  her  weight  into  the  slaveholders' 
scale,  from  expediency,  fear  of  new  measures,  ultraism,  or  any 
other  ghost,  kept  in  the  pay  of  the  devil,  to  scare  men  out  of 
their  duty.  But  it  is  not  so.  Vermont  will  do  her  duty  in 
the  great  struggle  between  slavery  and  h'berty. 

DESERTION   FROM  THE   RANKS. 

I  will  not  accuse  Mr.  J of  having  deserted  the  glorious 


EXTRACTS.  Ill 

cause  of  human  rights  for  the  sake  of  the  distinguished  office 
of  a  justice  of  the  peace.  I  wish  merely  to  say,  that  his 
election  as  justice  by  the  Democrats,  and  his  desertion  from 
the  friends  of  liberty,  were  contemporaneous  events  in  that 
gentleman's  history. 

A   PERVERTED   EDUCATION. 

If  you  begin  early  enough,  you  may  teach  a  boy  to  worship 
a  jackass,  and  every  time  he  neighs  and  shakes  his  reverend 
head,  the  boy  will  take  it  for  a  divine  communication. 

DUTY   TO   KEFUTE   SLANDER. 

I  should  have  thought  that  Mr. would  have  hired  a 

sick  horse,  or  come  on  foot,  or  on  crutches,  from  the  Lower 
Saginaw  to  Pontiac,  or  Flint  River,  or  any  other  spot  on  this 
terraqueous  globe,  to  have  made  his  honor  shine  through  the 
interstices  of  the  ribs  of  those  gibbeted  villains. 

NEGLECTING  THE   TRUE   ISSUE. 

Our  party  committed  a  great  mistake  in  Michigan,  in 
turning  their  attention  temporarily  from  the  great  question 
on  which  our  organization  was  founded,  to  the  consideration 
of  a  "  local  and  minor  point."  It  was  as  if,  on  coming  to 
see  John  Rogers  suffer,  at  Smithfield's  burning  stake,  your 
attention  was  to  be  entirely  consumed  during  the  martyrdom, 
in  beholding  a  dog  fight! 

JOHN   BOWDOWN. 

"  I  vote,"  says  one,  "  for  the  Bold  John  Faithful !»  On 
his  ballot  is  virtually  inscribed  his  sentiments,  his  legislation 
in  the  grand  committee  of  the  whole.  The  other  casts  his 
pro-slavery  vote,  saying,  "  I  go  for  John  Bowdown  to  the 
South  /» 

A    BANDED   POWER. 

The  town  power  is  the  power  of  powers.    Let  a  dozen  men 


112  ALVAN    STEWAKT. 

say,  in  December,  "  "We  will  elect  our  ticket  next  town-meet- 
ing," the  very  fact  that  they  have  a  given  object  before  them 
will  three-fold  every  man's  exertion,  and  lend  him  new  power, 
feeling  and  energy.  But  if  a  man  works  without  a  stint  be- 
fore him,  he  says,  "  I  cannot  see  the  length  and  breadth  of 
the  undertaking,"  and  he  will  work  as  solemn  and  as  stupid 
as  the  man  who  attempts  to  empty  the  mill-pond  with  his 
quart  cup. 

ECCLESIASTICAL   RECREANCY. 

The  Church  has  been  standing  on  the  north  side  of  the 
Hill  of  Expediency,  slipping  down  its  cold  and  icy  surface, 
from  height  to  depth,  until  her  vernacular  tongue,  her 
shibboleth,  became  that  of  the  mixed  multitude  in  the  vale 
below,  whose  idiom  and  pronunciation  were  taught  in  that 
classic  man-chattel  school. 

MAHOMET'S  COFFIN. 

This  year  will  settle  the  minds  of  the  slaveholders  and  their 
apologists,  and  those  timid  neutrals  who  are  existing  at  the 
centre  of  gravity,  and  are  as  likely  to  go  one  way  as  another  ; 
or,  from  an  equality  of  attraction,  to  be  held  half  way  between 
a  well-balanced  doubt  and  a  thriving  conjecture,  until  they 
putrify  for  want  of  motion,  and  pass  down  to  coming  times 
as  the  victims  of  position. 

DUTY   TO    VOTE. 

When  a  man  is  summoned,  as  a  spirit,  from  the  unknown 
and  indefinable  surrounding  eternity,  he  comes  to  take 
possession  of  a  body  which,  at  twenty-one  years  of  age,  is  a 
sovereign,  a  law-maker  in  the  land,  and  his  Creator  com- 
mands him  to  exercise  his  power  for  the  benefit  of  his  race, 
to  remember  those  in  bonds  as  bound  with  them,  to  love  his 
neighbor  as  himself,  and  to  do  the  greatest  good  to  the 
greatest  number.  "When  he  votes,  he  legislates  through  his 


EXTRACTS.  113 

agents  and  representatives ;  for,  as  a  nation,  we  are  always  in 
a  committee  of  the  Whole. 


I  am  rejoiced  to  see  how  good  a  freesoil  man  you  have 
become.  I  rejoice  at  the  movement,  and  if  I  had  health,  I 
would  roar  like  a  lion  in  the  wilderness,  from  Montauk  to 
Chatauque,  publishing  free  speech,  free  men  and  free  soil. 
Yes,  I  would  make  a  furrow  in  the  Free  Soil  so  deep  and  so 
wide,  that  slavery  would  never  dare  look  into  it. 

MODE   OP   LABOR. 

We  must  not  keep  hanging  round  our  favorite  deer-licks, 
but  scatter  abroad,  and  carry  our  principles  to  the  farmer  at 
the  plough,  and  to  the  mechanic  in  his  shop,  and  the  laborer 
at  his  toil,  wherever  he  may  be  found.  The  tune  is  gone  by  for 
us  to  sustain  troops  of  paid  lecturers,  and  now  every  man  of 
us  must  be  a  lecturer,  not  heralded  by  a  flourish  of  trumpets, 
but  sustained  and  urged  on  by  the  sweet  consciousness  that 
he  is  doing  his  duty  and  pleasing  his  God. 


Look  at  the  three  worthy  gaggers — Pinckney,  Patton  and 
Atherton — a  triumvirate  of  poor  creatures,  whose  names  will 
pollute  every  page  of  history,  where  their  ineffaceable  actions 
shall  be  recorded. 

NAT  TURNER. 

In  the  Nat  Turner  insurrection,  was  the  excitement  con- 
fined to  the  three  or  four  counties  where  the  rising  took 
place  ?  No,  by  no  means.  The  whole  South  was  converted 
into  a  guard-house  ?  Every  master  slept  on  his  pistols,  while 
the  nightly  patrols  went  up  and  down  in  every  direction. 
An  individual  of  the  humblest  station  had  struck  a  spark 


114  ALVAN    STEWART. 

which  well-nigh  ignited  the  whole  mass  of  volcanic  material 
on  which  the  South  reposes. 

ULTIMATE  SUCCESS. 

Do  not  be  disheartened.  Everything  wears  a  new  and 
glorious  aspect.  The  matter  is  absolutely  settled,  that  we 
must  abolish  slavery ;  and  as  sure  as  the  sun  rises,  we  shall, 
in  a  few  years,  ride  over  slavery  at  full  gallop,  unless  she 
picks  herself  up  and  gets  out  of  the  way  of  Liberty's 
cavalry. 

THE   ANTI-SLAVEKY  WAR-STEED. 

Our  anti-slavery  horse  is  a  little  restive,  and  will  carry  no 
other  load  in  the  first  instance,  except  emancipation  of  every 
slave  in  the  land.  He  will  kick  up  and  throw  off  the  load,  if 
you  put  on  him  a  Presbyterian  pack,  or  a  Methodist  bag,  or 
a  Quaker  blanket,  or  a  Democratic  sack  of  queer  matters,  or 
a  Whig  harness  ;  and  he  will  even  bite  if  you  attempt  to  put 
a  bridle  of  non-resistant  bits  in  his  mouth ;  he  will  not  wear 
an  abstract  martingale.  If  you  mean  to  have  him  thrive, 
feed  him  largely  on  ballot-box  oats.  He  desires  no  manger 
but  the  ballot-box.  As  long  as  we  fed  him  on  the  best  oats 
we  could  get  of  either  of  the  great  parties,  or  those  miser- 
able wild  ones  called  infinite  scatteration  oats,  he  throve  like  a 
certain  steed  fed  on  Connecticut  long  oats — to  wit,  whip- 
lashes— and  under  these  scant  feedings,  in  connection  with 
his  non-resistant  provender,  the  poor  fellow  grew  poor  and 
mangy,  until  you  could  count  his  ribs  as  easy  as  you  could 
the  hoops  of  a  flour-barrel.  But  since  we  have  fed  him  on 
concentrated  ballot-box  oats,  he  has  shed  his  old  coat,  begins 
to  lift  his  head  and  tail,  and  runs  round  the  field,  and  even 
snorts  with  exultation  at  his  new  and  delightful  sensations, 
and  the  fine  prospect  ahead. 


EXTEACT8.  115 


THEIFT  PALSIED   BY   SLAVERY. 

•  Slavery  has  been  one  of  the  main  causes  of  the  deranged 
condition  of  our  currency.  History  and  philosophy  teach 
that  every  system  of  unpaid,  coerced  labor,  is  intrinsically 
unprofitable  and  ruinous.  When  the  city  of  New  York 
sfruck  her  balance-sheet  after  the  crash  of  1837,  she  found  the 
South  her  debtor  in  more  than  $75,000,000 — little  of  which 
is  yet  discharged.  Slavery  has  leeched  the  industrious  North. 
The  truthful  philosophy  of  the  nine  digits  teaches,  that  we 
can  never  regulate  the  currency,  while  the  great  Disturber 
has  his  hands  on  the  monetary  heart-strings  of  the  country. 

DO    THE   SLAVES    DESIKE   LIBERTY  ?    . 

In  Georgia,  said  Mr.  S.,  about  three  years  ago,  there  lived 
a  man,  black  but  noble,  a  giant  in.  strength,  and  in  form  an 
Apollo  Belvidere,  about  thirty-five  years  of  age,  a  slave,  with 
a  wife  and  four  children  also  slaves.  The  love  of  liberty 
burned  irrepressibly  in  his  bosom,  and  he  determined  to 
escape,  and  free  his  wife  and  children  at  all  hazards.  He  had 
heard  of  Canada,  as  a  place  where  the  laws  made  every  man 
free,  and  protected  him  in  his  freedom.  But  of  its  situation 
or  the  road  thither,  or  the  geography  of  the  intermediate 
country,  he  knew  nothing.  A  Quaker  who  resided  near  him, 
being  privy  to  his  design,  resolved  to  aid  him  in  its  accom- 
plishment ;  and  accordingly  carried  the  slave  and  his  family 
fifty  miles  in  a  wagon  by  night.  In  the  daytime  they  lay 
concealed  in  the  woods,  and  on  the  second  night  the  same 
man  carried  them  fifty  miles  further.  At  the  end  of  the 
second  night,  he  told  the  black  man  that  he  could  do  no  more 
for  him,  having  already  endangered  both  his  life  and  property. 
He  told  the  slave  that  he  must  not  travel  on  the  highway, 
nor  attempt  to  cross  a  ferry,  but,  taking  him  by  the  hand,  he 
committed  him  to  God  and  the  north  star.  This  star  he  was 


116     '  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

to  take  as  his  guide,  and  it  would  lead  him  at  length  to  the 
land  of  British  freedom.  The  poor  slave  bade  adieu  to  his 
benefactor,  and  after  skulking  in  the  day  and  travelling  by 
night,  he  at  length  came  to  an  unexpected  obstacle.  It  was 
a  broad  river  (the  Savannah),  of  whose  existence  he  had  not 
the  least  knowledge.  But  as  nothing  remained  but  to  cross 
it,  he  tied  his  two  young  children  on  his  back,  and  between 
swimming  where  it  was  deep,  and  wading  where  it  was  shal- 
low, his  two  elder  sons  swimming  by  his  side,  he  at  length 
made  out  to  reach  the  opposite  bank ;  then  returning,  he 
brought  over  his  wife  in  the  same  manner.  In  this  way  he 
passed  undiscovered  through  the  States  of  South  and  North 
Carolina  and  Virginia,  crossed  Pennsylvania  without  even 
knowing  that  it  was  the  land  of  Quakers ;  and  finally,  after  six 
weeks  of  toil  and  hardship,  he  reached  Buffalo.  Here  he  placed 
his  wife  and  children  in  the  custody  of  a  tribe  of  Indians  in  the 
neighborhood,  for  the  poor  man  will  always  be  the  poor  man's 
friend,  and  the  oppressed  will  stand  by  the  oppressed.  The 
man  proceeded  to  town,  and  as  he  was  passing  through  the 
streets,  he  attracted  the  notice  of  a  colored  barber,  also  a 
man  of  great  bodily  power.  The  barber  stepped  up  to  him, 
and  put  his  hand  on  his  shoulder  and  said,  "  I  knoAV  you  are 
a  runaway  slave ;  but  never  fear,  I  am  your  friend."  The 
man  confessed  he  was  from  Georgia,  when  the  barber  said, 
"  Your  master  inquired  about  you  to-day,  in  my  shop,  but  do 
not  fear,  I  have  a  friend  who  keeps  a  livery  stable,  and  will 
give  us  a  carriage  as  soon  as  night  comes,  to  carry  your 
family  beyond  the  reach  of  a  master." 

As  the  ferry  boat  does  not  run  across  the  Niagara  in  the 
night,  by  day-break  they  were  at  the  ferry  house,  and  rallied 
the  ferryman  to  carry  them  to  the  Canada  shore.  They 
hastened  to  the  boat,  and  just  as  they  were  to  be  let  go,  the 
master  was  seen,  on  his  foaming  horse,  with  pistol  in  hand, 
calling  out  to  the  ferryman  to  stop  and  set  those  people 


EXTRACTS.  117 

ashore,  or  he  would  blow  his  brains  out.  The  stout  barber, 
quick  as  thought  said  to  the  ferryman,  "  If  you  don't  put  off 
this  instant,  I'll  be  the  death  of  you."  The  ferryman  thus 
threatened  on  both  sides,  lifted  up  his  hands  and  cried,  "  The 
Lord  have  mercy  on  me !  It  seems  I  am  to  be  killed  any 
how  ;  but  if  I  do  die,  I  will  die  doing  right,"  and  CUT  THE 
KOPE. 

The  powerful  current  of  the  Niagara  swept  the  boat  rapid- 
ly into  deep  water,  beyond  the  reach  of  tyranny.  The  work- 
men at  work  on  the  steamboat  Henry  Clay,  near  by,  almost 
involuntarily  gave  three  cheers  for  liberty.  As  the  boat  dart- 
ed into  the  deep  and  rapid  stream,  the  people  on  the  Canada 
side,  who  had  seen  the  occurrence,  cheered  her  course,  and 
in  a  few  moments  the  broad  current  was  passed,  and  the  man 
with  his  wife  and  children,  were  all  safe  on  British  soil, 
protected  by  British  laws ! ! 


SPEECH  DELIVERED  AT  PENNSYLVANIA  HALL, 

PHILADELPHIA,  MAY  15th,  1838, 
ON  A  RESOLUTION  RELATIVE  TO  THE  EIGHT  OF  PETITION. 

THE  House  of  Representatives  of  the  Congress  of  the 
United  States,  a  body  created,  by  the  breath  of  the  nostrils 
of  the  freemen  of  this  nation,  has,  by  a  palpable  violation  of 
the  Constitution,  denied  the  right  of  petition  ;  and  if  there  is 
merit  in  having  been  the  first  body  of  men  clothed  with  high 
legislative  power,  who  in  this  world  have  exercised  it  by 
refusing  to  hear  the  petitions  of  their  constituents,  then  the 
House  of  Representatives  stands  alone  in  its  glory,  pre- 
eminent, without  rival — treading  a  path  which  Egyptian 
Pharaoh,  and  Russian  Nicholas,  and  the  turbaned  Sultan, 
have  never  ventured  upon.  What  was  the  prayer  of  these 
denied  petitioners  ?  They  asked  the  abolition  of  slavery — 
AMERICAN,  REPUBLICAN  SLAVERY  ! 

"  Hear,  O  Heavens  !  and  be  astonished,  O  Earth !" — the 
representative  of  yesterday  denies  the  right  of  his  constituent 
of  to-day,  to  ask  him  to  give  liberty  to  the  bondman ;  denies 
the  constituent  the  right  of  having  his  petition  so  much  as 
read  in  the  presence  of  their  high  mightinesses !  The  future 
historian  of  this  land,  when  truth  shall  have  triumphed  over 
delusion,  when  the  sober  dictates  of  humanity  shall  have 
conquered  the  dark  spirit  of  slaveholding  fanaticism,  when 
quadrennial  President-making  shall  not  be  a  draft  on  the 
heart's  blood  of  our  expiring  liberties — astonishment  shall 
make  him  drop  his  pen  to  weep  over  the  degeneracy  of  his 
boasting  ancestors,  till  the  love  of  his  country's  fame  shall 
make  him  doubt  these  dreadful  scenes  in  the  narrative  of  the 

118 


SPEECH   ON   THE   RIGHT   OF   PETITION.  119 

20th  and  21st  of  December,  1837.  He  will  visit  the  city 
bearing  the  name  honored  by  the  father  of  his  country,  and 
turning  over  volume  after  volume  of  ancient  Congressional 
records,  shall  sigh  in  the  search  of  the  liberty-murdering 
Congress  of  December,  1837  ;  till  at  last  he  finds  on  that  ill- 
fated  2 1st  of  December,  1837,  that  Mr.Patton  of  Virginia  asked 
the  previous  question  to  be  put  for  the  adoption  of  a  resolu- 
tion, by  which  "  all  petitions  on  the  subject  of  slavery  to  that 
House  should  lie  upon  its  table  unread,  unprinted,  unref erred, 
undebated,  and  unconsidered y"  and  that  it  passed,  one  hun- 
dred and  twenty  for,  and  seventy-four  against  it.  "  Ah  !" 
says  the  future  Tacitus  of  this  land,  as  he  muses  over  these 
dark  and  man-dishonoring  pages — "  What  is  here  ?  The 
'  previous  question ' — the  tyrant's  gag ! — the  petitions  on 
slavery  '  unread,  unprinted,  unref erred,  undebated  and  un- 
considered.'' Oh !  what  a  rent  hath  slavery  made  in  the 
Constitution's  robe!" 

DECEMBEB    21ST,    1837. 

On  the  shortest  day  of  the  year — of  least  light — of  most 
darkness — the  deed  has  been  done  by  slaveholders  and  their 
wretched  apologists.  Oh,  the  21st  of  December,  1837  !  why 
must  that  day  rob  my  country  of  its  glory,  its  good  name, 
and  steep  it  in  infamy?  Let  the  21st  of  December,  1837, 
perish  from  my  country's  calendar.  Let  that  day  be  dark- 
ness forever  after.  "Let  not  God  regard  it  from  above, 
neither  let  the  light  shine  upon  it.  Let  darkness  and  the 
shadow  of  death  stain  it ;  let  a  cloud  dwell  upon  it ;  let  the 
blackness  of  the  day  terrify  it ;  let  it  not  be  joined  unto  the 
days  of  the  year ;  let  it  not  come  into  the  number  of  the 
months.  Let  the  night  be  solitary,  and  no  joyful  voice  come 
therein.  Let  them  curse  it,  that  curse  the  day,  who  are 
ready  to  raise  up  their  mourning.  Let  the  stars  of  the  twi- 


120  ALVAN   STEWART. 

light  thereof  be  dark.    Let  it  look  for  light,  but  have  none ; 
neither  let  it  see  the  dawning  of  the  day." 

BURIED   ARCHIVES. 

But  as  he  turns  with  mournful  steps  from  this  painful  soli- 
loquy, he  goes  to  a  room  thirty  by  twenty,  and  twelve  feet 
high,  and  beholds  the  mighty  mausoleum  of  the  embalmed 
remains  of  the  Great  Unread,  the  Great  Unprinted,  the  Great 
Unreferred,  the  Great  Unconsidered — the  dead  corpse  of  a 
nation's  right  of  petition,  laid  out  in  solemn  state  in  the  wing 
of  the  Capitol !  There  is  a  library  of  two  millions  of  authors 
on  one  subject — the  unread  library  of  a  nation's  humanity ! 
Behold  the  manuscripts,  three  times  the  number  of  the  Alex- 
andrian library.  There  lies  the  collected  majesty  of  entombed 
Philanthropy.  Yes,  to  this  pile  of  recorded  glory,  those  who 
wish,  in  coming  generations,  to  rank  high  for  the  nobility  of 
their  descent,  will  send  the  faithful  examiner  to  see  if  their 
ancestor  did  not  sign  these  unread  petitions  to  Congress,  on 
their  father's  or  mother's,  or  grandfather's  or  grandmother's, 
or  great  grandfather's  or  great  grandmother's  side.  And  if 
they  did,  the  man  who  searches  for  ancestral  merit  by  which 
to  raise  his  own,  will  believe  it  a  happy  day  for  him,  when  he 
shall  find  the  name  of  the  progenitors  of  his  race  written  on 
these  unread  and  imprinted  petitions  to  Congress,  for  the 
abolition  of  slavery,  in  the  34th,  35th,  36th,  37th  and  38th 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

RIGHT   OF   PETTTIOX. 

The  right  of  petition  is  as  old  as  human  want.  It  is  the 
language  of  the  child  to  the  parent.  His  every  want,  his 
every  necessity,  appeals  to  the  parent  by  way  of  petition. 
His  every  gratified  desire  is  but  the  fruit  of  some  granted 
petition.  The  pupil  in  the  school,  the  scholar  in  the  univer- 
sity, comes  to  his  superior  every  day  with  petitions.  The 


SPEECH  ON  THE  EIGHT  OF  PETITION.        121 

schoolmaster,  the  trustees  of  a  school,  or  the  inspectors  of 
schools,  or  the  commissioners  of  schools — the  commissioners 
of  highways,  and  the  path-master  have  their  petitioners. 
The  overseers  of  the  poor,  the  keepers  of  the  county  poor- 
house,  have  their  petitioners.  The  commissioners  of  excise, 
who  grant  rum-diplomas — -the  supervisor,  town-clerk,  and 
justices  are  petitioned.  Town  meetings  are  petitioned. 
The  board  of  supervisors  "sit  weeks  in  their  counties 
listening  to  and  deciding  petitions.  The  justice  courts, 
the  common  pleas,  the  supreme  courts,  and  chancery  are 
thronged  with  petitioners.  The  governors  of  States,  and 
the  President  of  the  United  States,  overwhelmed  as  they 
are  with  petitions,  have  they  ever  dared,  or  the  subor- 
dinate bodies  referred  to,  to  lay  petitions  presented  to  them 
on  their  tables,  unread  and  unconsidered  ?  ISTo.  Legisla- 
tures in  twenty-six  States,  sitting,  on  an  average,  three 
months  in  the  year,  or  about  one-fourth  of  the  time — the 
immediate  representatives  of  the  people — sit  for  the  express 
purpose  of  deciding  upon  the  petitions  presented  to  them  by 
the  people.  Who  ever  heard  of  a  legislature  in  one  of  those 
States,  except  New  York,  in  1837,  ever  refusing  to  read, 
print,  or  consider  the  petitions  of  the  people  ? 

Congress  sits  to  hear  the  various  petitions  of  this  nation, 
except  those  affecting  human  liberty,  more  than  one-third  of 
the  year.  The  whole  form  of  our  government,  family,  school, 
town,  county,  State,  nation — whether  in  the  legislative,  judi- 
cial, or  executive,  at  every  step  and  angle  of  proceeding  in 
human  affairs,  whether  in  Church  or  State,  whether  in  pros- 
perity or  adversity,  sickness  or  health,  moves  forward  on  the 
wheels  of  petitions.  Petitioning  or  requesting,  whether 
written  or  verbal,  is  one  side  of  affairs,  while  the  other  is  to 
consider  and  weigh  the  application  on  its  merits,  and  grant 
or  refuse  the  petition  asked. 

No,  the  whole  system  of  Divinity,  the  worship  of  God, 
6 


122  ALVAN    STEWAKT. 

whether  it  be  that  of  the  Mohammedan  or  the  Jew — Protestant 
or  Catholic — whether  it  he  idolatrous  or  spiritual,  in  what- 
ever form  religion  has  been  shadowed  forth  to  this  world, 
its  votaries  hold  communion  with  the  Unseen  Power,  by 
petition.  Man  as  man,  the  erring,  the  weak,  the  naked  and 
trembling  mortal  of  a  day,  goes  to  the  Being  who  is  infinitely 
his  superior,  by  prayer  and  petition. 

The  Almighty's  ear  is  not  dull  of  hearing  our  petitions  and 
complaints.  Petition  is  the  everlasting  language  in  all 
countries  and  all  climes,  in  all  ages  and  conditions,  of  the 
subordinate,  asking  assistance  from  man,  or  deliverance  from 
God.  This  is  inseparable  from  the  condition  of  man,  man 
free,  or  man  a  slave. 

What  subject  so  proper,  whether  presented  in  person  or  by 
another,  as  a  petition  to  deliver  the  slave  from  his  cruel 
bondage,  his  pain,  his  stripes,  his  insults — to  repeal  laws 
taking  away  all  his  rights  ;  to  petition  that  a  man  may  have 
his  wife,  a  woman  her  husband,  and  both,  their  children — and 
that  the  daughter  and  son  may  not  be  taken  from  them  and 
sent  where  the  parents  shall  see  them  no  more — that  their 
own  backs  may  feel  stripes  no  more — that  they  may  hunger 
no  more,  thirst  no  more,  be  insulted  no  more,  kept  ignorant 
no  more,  chained  no  more,  and  unpaid  for  labor  no  more. 

The  beings,  of  all  others,  requiring  the  intervention  of  su- 
preme legislative  power  in  their  behalf,  are  the  poor  slaves, 
already  bereaved  of  every  political  right  in  this  world. 
Shocking  to  relate,  these  same  audacious  men,  who  have 
stolen  the  slave  from  Africa,  by  tempting  the  kidnapper, 
with  their  money,  to  go  and  catch  him,  or  have  held  the 
slave  as  though  the  slave  was  under  special  obligation  to  the 
master,  that  he  even  permits  and  allows  him  to  breathe  and 
swallow  God's  fresh  air,  and  look  upon  the  same  sun  without 
striking  him  dead,  and  that  he  ought  to  be  delighted  to  have 
an  opportunity  to  serve  a  man,  naked  or  in  rags,  who  will 


SPEECH    ON   THE  EIGHT   OF   PETITION.  123 

suffer  him  to  hoe  cotton  from  daylight  in  his  cotton  field  till 
dark,  and  have  a  peck  of  corn  a  week,  or  four  cents  per  day 
to  buy  food — ah  !  yes,  these  southern  slaveholding  members 
of  Congress  deny  the  right  of  petition  in  behalf  of  these  most 
forlorn  beings,  who  are  made  wretched  by  being  made  the 
victims  of  pilfering,  by  having  their  masters  meanly  rob  them, 
and  steal  from  them,  and  whip  them,  to  get  more  out  of 
them,  and  then  say  to  them,  "We  have  abused  you  so  badly 
that  we  shall  not  allow  you  to  state  your  wrongs  to  the 
world  or  to  Congress,  as  we  do  not  intend  our  meanness 
shall  be  known." 

SLAVEHOLDERS'  SHAME. 

The  truth  may  as  well  be  known  to  the  world  first  as  last. 
The  reason  why  the  slaveholders  rose  up  in  the  face  of  day 
and  went  out  of  the  Hall  of  Representatives  of  this  nation  on 
the  20th  December  last,  and  concocted  their  successful 
scheme,  which  was  put  in  execution  the  next  day,  to  "  lay  all 
petitions  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  unread,  imprinted,  unre- 
ferred,  unconsidered  and  undebated  on  the  table,"  was  from 
shame  and  conscious  guilt,  not  having  courage  to  face  their 
deeds  of  cruelty,  darkness,  shame,  crime,  stealing,  robbery, 
debauchery,  and  meanness,  when  held  up  to  the  glare  of  the 
world  !  They  withered  in  advance,  before  the  coming  storm. 
"  Ah !"  say  they,  "  are  we,  the  sons  of  chivalry,  to  be  called 
thieves  and  sons  of  thieves — we,  who  are  members  of  Con- 
gress, living  in  pomp  on  the  unpaid  labor  of  the  helpless — 
are  we  to  be  called  devourers  of  widows'  houses,  yea,  of  the 
widows  themselves  and  their  children  ?  Shall  it  be  told  that 
we  made  the  poor  child  motherless  and  fatherless,  by  selling, 
for  money,  the  father  from  the  children  one  year  to  a  distant 
part  of  the  country,  never  to  return,  the  next  year  that  we 
have  sold  the  mother  whose  sable  breasts  were  the  fountains 
of  our  infantile  subsistence — the  next  year  that  we  have 


124  ALVAN   STEWART. 

whipped  and  sold  our  own  children,  and,  uninstructed,  made 
them  bondmen  to  the  number  of  half  a  million,  who  have  in- 
herited from  us,  their  white  fathers,  a  bastard  reputation, 
and  all  the  wretched  sorrows  of  a  slave."  Is  this  a  father's 
legacy  ? 

Deep,  conscious  guilt,  on  the  part  of  the  southern  masters, 
has  made  them  roar  like  the  ocean's  waves,  to  turn  the  eyes 
of  the  world  in  every  direction  except  toward  themselves — 
the  ears  of  mankind  to  hear  everything,  except  the  thrice-told 
tale  of  slaveholding  infamy.  Fear,  /ear,  shame,  shame,  yes, 
burning  SHAME,  laid  those  resolutions  on  the  table. 

EEPOKT   OX   SLAVERY. 

What !  could  the  slaveholder  bear  a  reference  of  the  two 
millions  of  petitions,  to  a  select  committee  who  felt  deeply 
for  the  slave,  with  power  to  send  for  persons  and  papers,  and 
with  leave  to  said  committee  to  sit  in  vacation,  from  the 
coming  July  till  December  after,  to  collect  all  the  materials 
for  a  report,  and  draw  the  death  warrant  of  slavery,  as  the 
very  report  itself  would  be  ? 

This  nation  only  requires  the  report  of  a  select  committee 
of  seven  persons,  energetically  employed  a  few  months,  to 
make  out  the  indictment  against  slavery,  to  have  a  verdict 
of  guilty  pronounced  by  an  injured  and  indignant  nation. 

What  will  be  in  that  report  ?  How  will  it  be  made  up  ? 
What  are  the  materials  of  such  a  report,  and  how  are  they  to 
be  obtained  ?  Let  us  look  at  it  a  little. 

1.  This  committee  should  send  for  all  the  codes  of  slave 
laws  of  the  several  States,  and  of  the  United  States.  Bring 
up,  now,  those  statute  books  of  blood  and  crime,  and  you 
will  find  them  full  of  high  treason  against  God  and  against 
humanity.  Laws  made  by  the  very  men  who  claim  this 
property  under  those  laws.  And  what  do  they  establish  ? 
Why,  power,  irresponsible  power,  of  man  over  man.  This  is 


SPEECH    ON    THE   EIGHT   OF   PETITION.  125 

the  beginning  and  the  end — the  pervading  spirit  of  the  whole 
code,  from  beginning  to  end.  Name  the  civil  right  which 
these  laws  secure  to  the  slave !  There  are  none ;  there  is  no 
recognition  of  a  single  right  in  the  slave. 

2.  What  is  the  sustenance  which  these  laws  claim  for  the 
black  man,  as  the  only  legal  compensation  for  a  life  of  com- 
piilsory  toil?  Read  the  words — "  one  peck  of  corn  per 
week  " — that  is,  two  shillings  a  week,  or  about  six  mills  for 
each  meal.  Our  northern  horses — pardon  me,  I  do  not  in- 
tend to  be  low ;  it  touches  humanity,  and  cannot  be  low ; — I 
was  saying  our  northern  horses  must  have  at  least  twenty- 
five  cents  per  day  in  oats — or  fourteen  shillings  per  week. 
The  keeping  of  one  northern  horse  is  equal  to  that  of  four- 
teen southern  slaves.  There  is  no  man  in  a  laborious  em- 
ployment here,  who  does  not  pay  a  dollar  and  a  half  or  two 
dollars  a  week  for  his  board.  Does  a  northern  man  eat 
fourteen  tunes  as  much  as  one  at  the  South  ?  No  ;  but  the 
saving  is  in  the  quality  and  cost  of  the  food.  Figures  will 
tell  you,  that  in  the  article  of  keeping  alone,  the  master  of 
200  slaves  will  make  a  saving  of  $314  a  week,  barely  by  the 
deductions  from  the  poor  slave's  stomach.  This,  in  a  year, 
would  make  the  pretty  sum  of  sixteen  thousand  dollars 
pinched  out  of  these  wretched  men!  The  whole  world 
would  cry  out.  But  until  such  an  investigation  can  be  made, 
I  fear  this  nation  will  not  believe  the  fact,  although  we  show 
it  in  the  very  statute  books  of  the  South.  Very  probably 
there  are  numbers  here  to-day,  who  will  set  all  this  down  as 
abolition  slang,  not  worthy  of  belief  or  regard.  But  if  they 
could  see  the  evidence  brought  out  in  a  Congressional  report, 
the  whole  nation  would  shout  in  a  voice  that  might  almost 
rend  the  rocks,  for  the  speedy  abolition  of  this  detestable 
system. 

3.  There  is  another  thing  which  we  should  find  in  these 
statute  books  of  the  Slave  States.    No  black  man  can,  in  any 


126  ALVAN    STEWART. 

circumstance,  be  a  witness  against  a  white  man.  Hang  that 
fact  up  before  the  nation  and  the  world.  Add  to  it,  that  by 
the  slave  code  no  marriage  can  be  binding  between  a  slave 
and  his  wife,  but  may  be  dissolved  at  any  moment  by  the 
arbitrary  will  of  the  master.  Then,  again,  the  parent  has  no 
authority  over  the  child,  to  train  or  govern  him  according  to 
the  law  of  God.  Hang  that  up  to  view.  Go  on,  now,  and 
make  a  full  synopsis  of  these  laws.  You  will  find,  however, 
that  they  have  made  provisions  for  hanging  the  man  who 
shall  murder  a  slave.  N"ow,  then,  let  the  committee  summon 
all  the  clerks  of  the  counties  throughout  the  slave  region,  to 
bring  their  records,  and  certify  whether  there  has  ever  been 
a  single  instance  of  a  master  being  hanged  for  the  murder  of 
a  slave.  Yet,  in  North  Carolina,  not  long  since,  two  white 
men  were  hung  for  merely  coaxing  a  slave  away  from  his 
master.  And,  I  suppose,  a  single  sheet  would  contain  a  list 
of  all  the  cases  on  record,  of  punishments  inflicted  on  masters 
for  cruelties  or  injuries  inflicted  on  their  slaves. 

4.  Next,  I  would  have  the  committee  of  Congress  call  up 
ten  experienced  planters  from  each  of  the  slave  States,  to 
testify  what  is  the  political  economy  of  slavery.  I  would 
require  them  to  state,  as  honest  men,  whether  the  question 
has  not  been  often  discussed  among  them,  which  is  the  most 
profitable,  to  work  slaves  to  death  in  five  years,  when  cotton 
is  fourteen  cents  per  pound,  or  to  work  them  twenty  years, 
with  cotton  at  ten  cents.  Inquire  of  them  whether  one-third 
of  the  plantation  slaves  are  not  let  out  to  tenants,  whose  only 
interest  is  to  get  out  of  those  poor  creatures  the  greatest 
possible  amount  of  labor,  with  the  least  possible  expense  for 
subsistence  and  comfort.  Ajid  yet  we  have  men  among  us, 
who  have  rolled  through  the  South  in  the  public  conveyances, 
and  seen  the  well-fed  servants  at  the  hotels,  and  who  tell  you 
they  know  all  about  slavery,  for  they  have  been  there,  and 
the  slaves  are  the  happiest  class  of  beings  in  the  world. 


SPEECH   ON   THE   EIGHT   OF   PETITION.  127 

5.  Next,  I  would  send  for  some  men  of  a  class  that  I  believe 
it  is  Patrick  Henry  describes,  as  ihefeculum  of  creation,  the 
scrapings  of  humanity — the  slave  drivers,  northern  men,  who 
have  sold  themselves,  body  and  soul,  to  carry  on  this  dreadful 
business  in  the  detail.     I  would  interrogate  them  as  to  the 
various  modes  of  subduing  a  refractory  spirit,  of  finding  out 
whether  a  slave  is  sick  or  feigns  sickness,  and  all  the  various 
expedients  of  cruelty,  by  which  an  overseer  tries  to  build  up 
the  reputation  of  a  great  labor-getter. 

6.  Let  our  Congressional  committee  then  send  for  a  hun- 
dred free  men  from  the  slave  States,  who  have  never  owned 
a  slave  themselves,  nor  their  relations,  and  let  them  tell  what 
they  know  about  the  cruelties  and  the  pollutions  incident  to 
the  system  of  slavery. 

7.  Then  I  would  send  for  a  hundred  free  colored  men, 
who  should  be  allowed  for  the  first  time,  under  the  security 
of  the  strong  arm  of  the  nation,  to  testify  of  their  wrongs. 
Let  each  one  tell  how  often  and  by  what  hair-breadth  escapes 
he  has  avoided  being  kidnapped  into  slavery.     Let  him  turn 
to  that  law  which  allows  the  magistrate   to   exile  a  free 
colored  man  from  his  country,  on  ten  days'  notice,  unheard, 
untried,  without  cause,  without  compensation,  as  passion  or 
caprice  may  dictate,  with  confiscation  of  his  estate ;  and  if 
he  refuses  to  go,  to  be  sold  as  a  slave,  and  his  children  after 
him  forever. 

8.  Then  I  would  have  them  call  for  a  hundred  of  the  ten 
thousand  fugitive  slaves,  that  have  found  a  refuge  in  Canada, 
under  the  government  of  a  hereditary  monarch,  from  the 
tender  mercies  of  our  republican  institutions.  •  Let  them  tell 
of  hopes  crushed  and  hearts  broken,  of  what  they  endured  in 
slavery,  and  of  the  sufferings  and  anxieties  through  which 
they  have  passed  while  in  the  pursuit  of  liberty. 

9.  Then  I  would  have  brought  up  before  the  committee  a 
hundred  slaves  from  the  cotton-fields  and  the  sugar-houses, 


128  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

who  should  give  ocular  demonstration  of  what  slavery  is.  I 
would  have  them  freed,  and  protected  by  a  strong  force,  and 
they  should  show  their  persons  abused,  their  limbs  mutilated, 
their  brands  and  gashes,  their  backs  cut  from  their  shoulders 
to  the  heels  with  republican  stripes. 

When  the  committee  have  gathered  all  the  information  in 
their  power,  let  it  be  embodied  in  a  report.  It  would  make 
a  volume  of  a  thousand  pages.  Then  send  that  report 
through  the  land.  Let  the  mails  burst  and  the  stages  groan 
with  the  mighty  load,  telling  the  naked  truth  on  this  subject, 
in  an  official  and  authentic  form ; — and  I  tell  you,  slavery 
never  lifts  its  abominable  head  again.  All  that  the  nation 
wants  is  to  have  a  case  once  made  out  to  their  conviction, 
that  slavery  is  what  Abolitionists  charge  it  tj  be,  and  our 
work  is  done. 

This  mountain  of  iniquity  would  then  stand  before  every 
honest  mind  in  all  its  dreadful  prominence.  The  people, 
horror-struck,  would  cry  out  against  it.  The  foundations  of 
the  great  deep  of  crime,  as  yet  unfathomed,  would  be  broken 
up.  As  yet  who  hath  believed  our  report,  as  Abolitionists  ? 
But  this  Avould  be  moral  demonstration.  It  would  be  taken 
on  the  oath  of  the  people  of  the  dark  and  sullen  regions  of 
slavery. — Yes,  with  this  report,  the  nation  would  pronounce 
their  everlasting  condemnation  and  overthrow  of  slavery,  and 
all  would  FEEE. 


SPEECH   ON  THE    GEEAT  ISSUES 

BETWEEN  EIGHT  AND  WKONG. 

DELIVERED   AT   PENNSYLVANIA   HALL,    MAY   16,    1838, 
Before  several  Thousand  People. 

AMEX,  and  amen,  have  been  shouted  from  the  throats  of 
the  unthinking  millions  of  this  earth,  as  the  mandates  of  tyr- 
anny were  proclaimed,  as  the  edicts  of  inhumanity  were  pub- 
lished to  the  world  ;  while  the  lamentations  of  the  oppressed 
have  ascended  night  and  day,  as  swift  witnesses  before 
the  living  God.  These  loud  outcries  of  the  injured  against 
unavenged  cruelty,  have  created  epochs  in  the  march  of  ages. 
At  different  periods  of  the  world,  there  have  been  great 
issues  formed  between  right  and  wrong,  liberty  and  slavery, 
and  on  the  determination  of  those  issues  have  depended  the 
stability  or  overthrow  of  empires,  the  rising  and  falling  pf 
nations. 

The  pages  of  history,  divine  or  profane,  are  the  recorded 
evidence,  arguments,  and  facts  of  each  generation  as  they 
have  been  summoned  to  share  in  the  creation  and  decision 
of  those  issues.  When  the  issue  has  been  correctly  framed, 
crime,  ashamed  of  her  own  frightful  progeny,  has  called  in 
falsehood,  with  her  open  mouth,  to  deceive  the  weak  and  the 
thoughtless. 

Truth  has  been  insulted  and  clamored  down  by  the  roar  of 
numbers,  who  have  interrupted  her  narrative  or  insulted  her 
for  the  humility  of  her  dress,  or  derided"  her  for  want  of 
those  high-born  relations  which,  in  the  shape  of  impudence, 


130  ALVAN    STEWART. 

interest,  superstition,  obstinacy,  and  love  of  power,  have 
confederated  to  impeach  her,  by  sneering  at  the  simplicity  of 
her  statements,  by  undervaluing  the  force  of  her  arguments, 
while  they  have  sung  praises  to  the  highest  notes  of  False- 
hood, sworn  its  deformity  was  beauty,  and  the  harsh  grind- 
ings  in  the  prison-house  of  its  oppression  were  the  sympho- 
nies of  sympathizing  humanity ;  yea,  more,  they  chanted 
praises  of  honor  and  glory  to  its  deductions,  and  sung  anthems 
to  its  sophistries,  and  cried  amen  to  its  conclusions. 

Honest  error  has  often  been  a  powerful  antagonist  of  truth, 
and  the  only  enemy  whom  truth  assailed  with  compassion, 
and  before  whom  truth  had  reason  to  tremble.  For  when 
sincerity,  one  of  the  darling"  attributes  of  truth  itself,  var- 
nishes error,  the  judges  of  the  issue  sometimes  mistake  the 
armor  of  Achilles  for  the  mighty  form  which  it  was  made  to 
protect. 

What  is  right  or  what  is  wrong  ?  "Where  are  the  bound- 
aries that  separate  ? 

How  far  human  arrangements  can  change  the  abstract 
wrong  into  an  expedient  right,  or  the  abstract  right,  if 
asserted,  into  a  wrong,  are  mighty  questions,  settled  in  the 
early  ages  of  the  world,  and  thousands  of  times  since ;  but 
they  now  seem  to  come  forward  as  fresh  questions,  demand- 
ing a  decision  with  all  the  eagerness  of  zeal,  with  all  that  gives 
weight  to  high  pretension,  and  with  an  impatience  that  for- 
bids delay,  from  the  magnitude  of  the  interests  involved ;  so 
that  our  minds  are  compelled  to  become  moral  scales,  to 
re-weigh  and  re-mark  the  mighty  interests  of  humanity. 

But  these  questions  have  been  weighed  and  considered  by 
Him  who  cannot  err,  who  is  the  author  of  right,  the  enemy 
of  wrong.  His  weights  and  measures  are  the  enduring  reve- 
lations of  perfect  wisdom.  The  delivered  opinions  of  the 
Eternal  came  down  to  this  world,  while  men  were  contending 
in  the  forum  of  philosophical  definitions,  groping  in  the 


THE   GKEAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WRONG.      131 

twilight  of  their  understandings,  and  wasting  their  lives  in 
finding  a  standard  of  right  in  uninstructed  conscience.  The 
pity  of  Him  Avhose  home  is  immensity,  who  is  from  everlast- 
ing to  everlasting,  Avho  placed  the  shining  worlds  on  their 
great  pathways,  and  gave  them  a  momentum  which  flying 
ages  do  not  weaken,  who  knows  each  rood  and  inch  between 
all  the  self-balanced  globes  as  they  rush  round  the  skies  in 
their  untired  race  of  ages — of  that  God,  who  permits  each 
one  to  travel  its  sublime  and  annual  journey  around  the  sun, 
was  manifested  in  giving  man  a  rule  of  action  for  time,  eter- 
nity, forever,  "  LOVE  THY  NEIGHBOR  AS  THYSELF."  The  law 
of  gravitation  of  the  moral  universe ! 

Every  departure  from  this  eternal  landmark  of  duty,  how- 
ever small,  has  been  the  parent  of  crime  and  human  agony. 

FIRST  ISSUE,    CAIN   AND   ABEL. 

The  first  issue  ever  made  between  right  and  wrong,  the 
holy  liberty  of  conscience,  and  the  brutal  violence  of  oppres- 
sion, was  between  the  two  first  of  woman  born.  While  the 
younger  employed  moral  weapons  to  vindicate  his  sentiments, 
such  as  prayer  and  petition,  and  went  to  God  for  strength, 
wisdom,  and  direction ;  the  elde/  used  the  modern  club- 
logic  ;  he  preferred  the  bludgeon  to  manly  debate  ;  to  silence 
investigation  was  better  than  to  convince ;  to  murder  his 
opponent  was  easier  than  to  answer  his  arguments.  Cain 
was  the  founder  of  the  brute-force  system  of  logic,  being  the 
only  method  then,  or  ever  since  known  by  its  admirers,  cf 
answering  unanswerable  arguments. 

This  mode  of  reasoning,  like  the  extreme  unction  for  the 
dying  man,  is  not  to  be  resorted  to  except  in  the  distressing 
emergency  of  having  no  other  mode  by  which  to  protect 
folly  from  contempt,  obstinacy  from  rebuke,  ignorance  from 
pity,  and  crime  from  punishment.  If  Cam  could  have  proved 
Abel  in  an  error,  then  Abel  might  have  died  in  his  bed,  at 


132  ALVAN    STEWART. 

nine  hundred  years  of  age,  or  more.  But  because  he  could 
not,  therefore  he  slew  him.  So  we  see  the  first  witness  called 
to  establish  truth  died  a  martyr ;  and  the  morning  of  the 
new  world  was  hung  in  black  by  the  depravity  of  man. 

NEXT   ISSUE,    NOAH    AGAINST   THE   WORLD. 

The  next  great  issue  made  up  for  everlasting  remembrance, 
was  between  Noah  and  his  family  of  eight  souls,  against  the 
world — of  right  against  wrong.  What,  could  eight  persons 
be  the  only  ones  right,  and  the  whole  world  wrong  beside  ? 
It  seems  so.  Truth  is  not  always  found  keeping  company 
with  the  multitude,  leading  armies,  or  seeking  the  shout  of 
numbers. 

But  the  last  mountain  top  of  the  antediluvian  world  was 
covered  with  water,  truth  then  being  on  board  the  floating 
ark,  in  the  eight  witnesses,  on  that  ocean  without  shore  or 
island.  These  eight  human  beings  were  the  connecting  links 
between  two  "worlds  ;  ftnd  lest  their  narrative  should  be 
denied  in  the  coming  profane  ages  of  philosophic  skepticism, 
the  massive  floors  on  which  the  ocean  rolled,  were  torn  up, 
aud  piled  away  on  the  tops  of  mighty  mountains,  in  monu- 
mental strata,  on  whose  pages  are  written  the  history  of  a 
drowned  world — a  record  of  God's  judgment  lithographed 
on  the  primal  formations  of  the  enduring  rock  ! 

EGYPT   AGAINST    THE   HEBREWS. 

But  the  most  sublime  and  grand  issue  ever  framed  between 
guilty  man  and  his  Maker,  on  the  trial  of  which  such  amazing 
consequences  depended,  was  WHETHER  MAN  SHOULD  BE  THE 
PROPERTY  OF  MAN  OR  THE  SERVANT  OF  GOD  ? — whether  man 
should  lose  his  charter  in  himself  and  become  incorporated  in 
another's  self  ?— whether  a  man  should  cease  to  have  use  for 
his  mind  and  his  body,  so  that  another  might  take  that  mind 
and  body  and  appropriate  it  to  himself,  and  extinguish  all 


TIIE   GREAT    ISSUES    BETWEEN    RIGHT  AND   WRONG.       133 

claim  of  the  individual  in  and  to  himself?  This  could  not  be 
permitted  without  denying  God's  interest  and  claim  in  each 
being  whom  he  had  created  for  His  own  will  and  pleasure. 
Thsrefore,  as  God  had  made  man,  he  had  a  right  to  his  own 
workmanship  ;  and  having  conferred  on  man  certain  high 
powers,  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  which  hap- 
piness consists  in  obeying  his  Creator's  laws,  this  being  could 
not  abandon  or  surrender  these  rights  to  another  human 
being,  nor  could  another  human  being  assume  them — rights, 
which  in  their  nature  could  neither  be  surrendered  by  one,  or 
assumed  by  another,  because  of  God's  interest  in  man  as  his 
Maker.  God  had  a  claim  on  those  unsurrenderable  and  un- 
assumable  rights — a  mortgage  on  them  which  can  never  be 
extinguished  in  time  or  cancelled  in  eternity. 

Egypt  was  the  theatre  of  this  momentous  issue,  in  the 
event  of  which  every  question  affecting  human  liberty  was 
involved,  considered  and  determined.  Who  were  the  par- 
ties ?  Haughty  Egypt  in  the  plenitude  of  her<power,  with  a 
population  of  twenty  millions,  the  schoolmaster  of  the  world, 
the  granary  of  mankind,  the  home  of  civilization  ;  whose 
proud  cities  opened  and  shut  their  hundred  gates ;  whose 
imperishable  structures  of  monumental  marble  must  have 
equalled  in  expenditure  the  united  energies  of  the  generations 
of  the  nineteenth  century  ;  whose  mountains  for  miles  inward 
were  penetrated  and  excavated  with  the  silent  palaces  of  the 
dead ;  whose  power  brought  from  the  cataracts  of  the  Nile 
to  the  Delta,  the  Monolith  temple  of  solid  rock — Egypt,  with 
her  acre-covering  temples — with  her  artificial  lakes,  her  giant 
sphinxes,  her  twenty  pyramids,  those  piles  of  wonder  where 
art  seems  to  rival  nature  in  her  boldest  work.  And  on  the 
other  hand,  two  and  a  half  millions  of  Hebrew  slaves  /  a  na- 
tion of  tasked  bondmen,  brickmakers  under  their  task-masters 
and  drivers. 

Egypt   was  the  oppressor ;  two   and   a  half  millions  of 


134  ALVAN   STEWART. 

Hebrews  were  the  oppressed  slaves,  and  God  the  judge, 
avenger  and  deliverer.  Never  was  there  such  a  display  of 
Almighty  power ;  never,  since  the  creation  of  this  world,  has 
the  Arm  of  Omnipotence  been  more  signally  revealed  than  in 
this  manifestation  of  His  utter  abhorrence  of  slavery,  and 
His  love  of  human  liberty.  He  caused  the  mighty  river  of 
Egypt  to  run  with  blood  from  its  upper  cataracts  to  its  seven 
mouths,  and  as  the  Mediterranean  received  the  tribute  of  the 
Kile,  it  blushed  at  Pharaoh's  insult  to  Jehovah,  in  presuming 
to  hold  man  as  a  slave.  The  hail  and  lightning,  the  ice  and 
fire  leaped  from  their  chambers  in  the  clouds  to  the  slave- 
insulted  soil,  to  avenge  the  quarrel  of  the  abused.  The 
locusts  forsook  their  sullen  solitudes  of  whirling  sands,  and  in 
dark  armies  came  riding  on  the  winds  to  consume  the  pro- 
ducts of  the  spoiler's  fields.  The  murrain  smote  the  cattle  of 
the  task-master ;  and  on  that  last  dreadful  night  uprose 
the  death-wail  along  the  reedy  margin  of  the  Nile,  and  from 
the  heart  of  the  mighty  cities,  as  the  Angel  of  Death  passed 
silently  and  unseen  from  house  to  house  and  struck  down 
two  and  a  half  millions  of  the  first-born  of  Egypt.  Pharaoh, 
in  the  pride  of  human  glory,  said  to  himself,  "  I  will  become 
the  defender  of  Egypt's  power  against  these  slaves,  my  brick- 
makers,  by  whose  unpaid  labor  I  have  reared  those  imper- 
ishable structures,  which  will  stand  to  the  last  day  of  time, 
exciting  astonishment  and  commanding  admiration"  -from 
generation  to  generation ;  I  WILL  NOT  LET  THE  PEOPLE  GO." 
The  Almighty  taught  him  the  folly  and  crime  of  his  presump- 
tion. To  doubt  the  Deity's  hatred  of  slavery,  is  to  deny  the 
truth  of  this  astonishing  account.  It  is  to  deny  the  Old  and 
New  Testament.  It  is  to  deny  our  own  nature — the  unwritten 
law  of  conscience.  It  is  to  deny  and  despise  all  the  cries  and 
pleadings  of  our  humanity.  It  is  to  deny  our  very  existence. 
It  is  to  say  there  is  no  ski,  that  one  thing  is  as  right  as  an- 
other, stealing  is  as  honest  as  labor  lewdness  is  the  same  as 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WRONG.       135 

modesty,  cruelty  as  kindness,  robbery  as  benevolence,  piracy 
as  a  purchase.  To  deny  the  crime  of  slavery  is  to  say  there 
is  no  right,  no  Avrong,  no  justice,  no  injustice. 

Behold  the  flying  fugitives  !  The  Red  Sea  in  their  front, 
mountains  on  their  right  and  left,  and  the  uncounted  hosts 
of  Egypt  in  their  rear.  See  the  poor  fugitives  and  their 
little  ones  in  the  pass  of  the  mountains ;  overwhelmed  with 
terror,  they  go  to  the  banks  of  the  sea,  and  it  gathers  its 
waters  in  walls — while  the  triumphant  freedmen,  with  praises 
on  their  tongues,  and  in  their  hearts,  turn  round  to  behold 
the  Almighty  causing  the  Egyptian  wheels  to  forsake  their 
axletrees,  and  the  wall  of  water  to  yield  and  cover  up  their 
task-masters  forever ! 

A  late  traveller,  of  the  last  ten  years,  sent  a  pearl-diver 
down  to  examine  the  supposed  path  of  the  nation  of  fugitives, 
and  discovered  pieces  of  Egyptian  armor  and  implements  of 
war,  attesting  the  truth  of  this  highway  in  the  deep,  never 
travelled  over  but  once. 

These  fugitive  slaves  had  a  cloud  by  day  and  a  pillar  of 
fire  by  night  for  their  outstretched  banner. 

"  By  day  along  the  astonished  landa 

The  cloudy  pillar  glided  slow, 
By  night  Arabia's  crimson  sands 
Returned  the  fiery  column's  glow." 

They  were  fed  with  food  direct  from  the  Almighty's  table  for 
forty  years  in  a  land  of  emptiness  and  want,  where  the  prowling 
hyena  and  gaunt  wolf  howled  in  the  bitterness  of  hunger 
unappeased.  The  rock  opened  its  flinty  mouth,  and  sent 
its  cooling  waters  after  them.  The  Almighty,  in  scorn 
of  human  greatness,  and  to  show  himself  no  respecter 
of  persons,  made  these  despised,  runaway  slaves  the 
honored  recipients  of  the  LAW  of  LAWS — the- ten  eternal 
orders  of  God  inscribed  with  His  fingers,  and  delivered  to 


136  ALVAN   STEWART. 

them,  while  the  rocky  heart  of  Sinai  quaked  and  trembled 
with  His  thunders,  and  its  summit  shone  with  celestial 
brightness  as  the  lightning  blazed  around  its  pinnacles,  and, 
through  the  pauses  of  the  storm,  the  voice  of  the  great  trum- 
pet waxed  louder  and  louder  ! 

Thus  these  poor  fugitives  had  the  custodial  care  of  the  first 
Heaven-lent  geography,  which  shows  the  pathway  through 
which  man  must  travel,  in  order  to  enter  on  the  joys  of  that 
undiscovered  country  from  which  none  return. 

To  them  was  intrusted  God's  revelation,  the  living  fountain 
from  whose  waters  of  truth  all  of  the  civilized  nations  of  the 
earth  have  drawn  the  fundamentals  of  jurisprudence.  Yes, 
these  fugitive  slaves  were  God's  librarians,  and  had  the  holy 
keeping  of  His  laws,  which  have  been  the  great  moral  light 
of  this  world. 

IDUMEA'S  BLIGHT. 

But  what  was  the  treatment  these  oppressed  and  fleeing 
fugitives  met  with  from  the  hands  of  the  King  of  Edom — the 
land  of  Idumea  ? 

Here  we  have  an  awful  demonstration  of  God's  detestation 
of  a  nation  which  could  dare  attempt  to  arrest  or  impede  the 
progress  of  fleeing  fugitive  slaves,  who  sought  a  passage 
through  a  neutral  country  to  the  land  of  freedom.  For  that 
crime  the  malediction  of  the  Most  High  has  brooded  over 
the  land  of  Idumea  ! 

Oh!  what  a  solemn  fulfillment  of  prophecy!  Look  at 
Petra,  the  city  of  the  Rock  in  the  mountains — the  wonder- 
ful capital  of  this  Heaven-doomed  land — this  nest  of  one  of 
the  world's  great  empires,  girded  about  with  everlasting 
mountain  barriers.  Behold  her  theatres,  temples,  and  cata- 
combs, vying  with  imperial  Rome  in  the  days  of  her  Caesars, 
cut  from  her  granite  mountains,  with  rocky  roofs  one  thousand 
feet  in  thickness  culminating  above.  Behold  her  mighty 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WKONQ.      137 

palaces  without  mortar,  without  joints,  chiselled  out  of 
primeval  rock — perfect  after  the  long  lapse  of  centuries,  as 
when  first  opened ! 

Yet  this  ancient  abode  of  polished  life,  which  felt  the 
movings  of  a  mighty  ambition,  has,  for  twenty  centuries, 
been  abandoned  of  God  and  forsaken  of  man,  only  tenanted 
by  the  obscene  bird  and  loathsome  serpent — the  sole  inmates 
of  the  palaces  of  kings  and  lodgers  in  the  chambers  of 
departed  greatness.  No  man  abides  in  this  lone  land,  no 
man  says  this  is  my  home.  A  land  once  red  with  the  blood 
of  the  grape,  and  thronged  with  populous  life,  it  has  become 
a  sterile  and  majestic  solitude — borne  down  by  the  withering 
curse  of  God,  for  the  crime  of  opposing  the  escape  of  the 
fugitive  Hebrew  slaves  from  the  land  of  the  spoiler. 

There  stands,  and  will  stand  to  the  end  of  time,  the  witness, 
telling  to  each  generation  of  the  world,  as  £hey  flow  down  the 
long  stream  of  ages,  "  here  was  once  a  crime  committed  by 
man  against  man,  by  a  nation  of  prosperity  against  a  nation 
of  fugitive  slaves,  flying  in  distress."  The  punishment  was 
inflicted  in  the  zenith  of  her  glory,  and  she  is  the  only  country 
on  the  globe  which  has  been  depopulated  from  century  to 
century,  as  an  enduring  testimonial  of  the  Almighty's  wrath. 
As  the  solitary  traveller  wanders  over  the  ruins  of  Petra,  he 
is  alarmed  as  echo  sends  back  her  voice  in  answer  to  his  foot- 
steps from  the  lonely  temple,  the  deserted  palace,  and  silent 
catacombs  ;  astonished,  he  lifts  his  eye,  surrounded  by  ever- 
during  walls  of  rock,  and  beholds  the  only  living  being,  an 
eagle,  in  the  regions  of  the  blue  sky,  revolving  in  his  noontide 
gyrations  over  the  doomed  City  of  the  Mountains. 

The  flight  of  the  Hebrews  from  the  house  of  bondage  took 
place  at  a  period  when  Egypt  was  the  home  of  science — the 
Gamaliel  at  whose  feet  the  learned  and  inquiring  of  other 
nations  sat.  She  was  at  the  head  of  the  families  of  the  earth, 
and  within  her  borders  were  locked  up  those  discoveries 


138  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

which  have  since  astonished  mankind.  In  the  contest  between 
Israel  and  Egypt,  therefore,  it  was  enlightened  strength  con- 
tending against  ignorant  weakness.  There  was  too  much 
power  to  decide  the  question  by  reason  and  argument,  on  the 
side  of  the  Egyptians,  and  too  much  feebleness  on  the  part  of 
the  Hebrews.  But  we  are  somewhat  struck  at  the  superior 
refinement  of  the  haughty  slaveholders  of  Egypt,  compared 
with  those  of  the  United  States. 

Pharaoh,  as  the  representative  of  supreme  power,  tolerated 
Moses  and  Aaron  with  rights  denied  by  an  American  Con- 
gress and  southern  slaveholders,  to  wit,  the  rights  of  PETITION 
and  FREE  DISCUSSION.  For  this  matter  was  discussed  no  less 
than  seven  or  eight  times  in  the  palace  of  Egypt ;  and  Pharaoh 
never  denied  the  right  of  petition  but  once,  and  that  was 
when  he  told  Moses  not  to  come  before  him  again.  But  that 
was  at  the  time  w^ien  Moses  had  ceased  to  petition,  as  the 
business  was  lodged  in  the  hands  of  the  angel  of  death. 


ADVENT   OF   THE 

The  next  great  issue  was  the  advent  of  our  Redeemer. 

The  issue  was  between  religion  and  its  counterfeits ;  be- 
tween religion  and  liberty  on  one  side,  and  idolatry  and 
slavery  on  the  other. 

The  Redeemer,  the  poorest  man  in  Judea,  and  yet  the  very 
God,  took  upon  himself  the  form  of  a  servant — the  most 
despised  form  of  our  common  humanity.  The  Redeemer 
came  to  lift  up  large  masses  of  mankind  in  the  shape  of  the 
poor,  the  imprisoned,  the  enslaved,  the  miserable,  the  igno- 
rant, and  place  them  on  the  summit  level  of  our  common 
humanity,  and  vindicate  their  relationship  to  God.  And  in 
the  course  of  three  centuries  after  he  preached  his  sermon  on 
the  Mount,  during  which  time  ten  generations  came  and 
crossed  the  bridge  of  human  life,  the  truths  of  that  sermon 
had  grappled  with  principalities  and  powers,  with  prejudice, 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WRONG.      139 

and  idolatry,  and  slavery,  which  had  grown  sturdy  by  their 
hold  on  mankind  for  a  thousand  yeai'S,  and  had  filled  the 
Roman  world  with  chiselled  gods  of  men's  device,  while  the 
unpaid  slave  groaned  from  the  Apennines  to  the  banks  of 
the  Euphrates,  from  the  Scamander  to  the  Tweed,  from  the 
mountains  of  Mauritania  to  the  dark-rolling  Danube.  At  the 
end  of  three  hundred  years  from  the  blessed  Saviour's 
humanity,  his  holy  principles  had  banished  idolatry  and 
slavery  from  the  wide-spread  Roman  world,  with  its  one 
hundred  and  twenty  millions  of  inhabitants. 

But,  oh  !  how  often  did  the  fagot  burn — did  the  martyr's 
blood  flow,  in  defending  the  liberty  of  conscience  and  of  per- 
son, before  the  world  assented  to  these  principles  ! 

THE    REFORMATION. 

The  next  great  issue  to  which  the  mind  of  Europe  was 
summoned  was  the  Reformation  of  the  fourteenth  century. 
Slavery  and  idolatry  had  come  back  to  this  world  again.  The 
contest  again  was  between  truth  and  falsehood. 

The  men  of  that  generation  made  brick  without  straAV ; 
their  substance  was  eaten  out  by  ecclesiastical  imposition  ;  a 
midnight  of  despotism  brooded  over  the  faculties  of  the 
moral  world.  Slaves  in  a  state  of  serfism  or  villanage,  were 
groaning  beneath  the  military  pomp  of  the  feudal  system. 

The  human  mind  rose  up  from  the  sleep  of  a  thousand 
years,  and  shook  from  itself  the  accumulated  errors  of  ages, 
and  broke  those  bandages  in  which  the  independence  of  the 
mind  and  body  had  been  swathed. 

From  great  issues  and  mighty  trials  like  these,  have  been 
drawn  all  the  truth,  the  religion,  and  liberty  which  have 
blessed  this  world. 

But  hypocrisy,  with  ruin  and  darkness  rioting  in  its  heart, 
entered  the  portals  of  the  church,  and  put  on  the  cast-off 
livery  worn  by  ruined  angels,  when  their  guilty  ambition 


140  ALVAN   STEWART. 

expelled  them  from  the  realms  of  light;  and,  professing 
veneration  for  God's  eternal  witnesses,  the  Old  and  New 
Testaments,  these  impostors  have  declared,  that  these  wit- 
nesses spake  that  which  they  did  not — that  these  witnesses 
declared  slavery  was  an  institution  of  Heaven,  sanctioned  by 
the  God  of  justice  and  mercy ! 

These  baneful  perversions  of  Divine  truth  have  been 
employed  for  the  most  malignant  purposes,  so  that  southern 
professors  of  religion  and  professed  ministers  of  Christ,  pre- 
tend to  get  their  authority  to  rob  the  slave  of  himself,  his 
mind,  his  body,  his  wife  and  children,  from  the  Bible ! ! 

THE  ISSUE   OF    1776. 

North  America,  in  her  political  behavior,  is  a  contradiction 
in  terms.  She  was  the  land  of  refuge  for  the  oppressed. 
Corrupt  Europe,  of  the  seventeenth  century,  drove  from  her 
bosom  her  most  pious,  noble,  and  independent  sons,  to  search 
for  liberty  of  conscience  in  the  howling  wilderness  of  the 
Occidental  world.  The  Puritan  of  New  England,  the  Catholic 
of  Maryland,  the  Episcopalian  of  Virginia,  and  the  Friends 
of  Pennsylvania,  claimed,  like  the  Hebrews  in  Egypt,  the 
right  of  making  the  wilderness  their  temple  to  worship  God. 
Yes,  they  leaped  the  barriers  of  the  ocean's  solitudes,  and 
nestled  down  amongst  the  wild  aborigines,  to  enjoy  the 
liberties  of  body  and  mind,  and  escape  oppression.  Oh, 
horrid  solecism!  that  such  a  land  should  now  become  the 
grand  rendezvous  of  slaves,  outnumbering  those  of  any  other 
country  in  the  civilized  world. 

The  year  1776  astonished  the%  world  with  a  new  issue, 
which  reached  ,up  and  down  and  all  around  the  circle  of 
humanity.  This  issue  was  tendered  to  the  oppressors  of 
mankind  throughout  the  world,  by  the  patriotic  Congress  of 
the  United  States,  who  threw  in  the  teeth  of  tyrants,  feudalists, 
monarchists,  the  inheritors  of  power,  the  primogeniturists,  the 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WRONG.       141 

kidnappers,  slaveholders,  man-despisers,  and  man-haters,  these 
words  of  mighty  import :  "  All  men  are  created  equal,  and 
are  endowed  by  their  Creator  loith  certain  inalienable  rights, 
among  which  are  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness y" 
and  to  vindicate  the  truth  of  this  proposition,  the  people  of 
these  United  States  poured  out  their  blood  like  water,  for 
seven  years. 

Philosophers,  philanthropists,  politicians  and  jurists  had 
written  tomes  and  folios  of  metaphysical  musings  and  abstrac- 
tions, to  settle  the  starting  point  of  man's  existence — the 
rights  of  one  as  compared  with  those  of  another  in  coming 
into  the  compact  of  civil  society. 

But  in  going  up  to  a  remote  antiquity,  to  learn  what  prin- 
ciples governed  those  lawgivers  who  laid  the  foundations  of 
civil  polity  for  those  old  nations  in  Europe,  fable  occupies  the 
place  of  veritable  history,  and  history  teems  with  its  thousand 
falsehoods,  and  bewilders  the  mind  without  instructing  the 
judgment,  and  leaves  the  inquirer  at  the  horizon's  distance 
from  certainty,  if  not  from  truth. 

The  feudal  system,  the  doctrine  of  primogeniture — that  ex- 
ecutive, legislative  and  judicial  powers,  were  matters  of  inheri- 
tance— may  be  considered  the  elementary  doctrine  of  Europe. 

That  men  are  born  equal  is  a  great  moral  proposition,  com- 
ing from  God,  and  as  old  as  man,  and  grows  out  of  His  own 
eternal  benevolence,  by  which  it  is  said  that  God  is  no 
respecter  of  persons. 

The  doctrine  of  primogeniture  is  that  by  which  the  oldest 
child,  being  male,  is  born  to  the  inheritance  of  the  whole 
landed  estate  of  a  father  or  relative,  and  the  other  children  of 
no  part ;  by  which  the  oldest  child  of  a  king,  or  prince,  or 
duke,  earl,  or  noble,  however  weak,  is  born  to  the  inheritance 
of  executive,  legislative  and  judicial  power,  while  the  son  of 
the  peasant,  however  cultivated  by  learning,  or  however 
superior  by  force  of  an  exalted  genius,  is  only  born  to  obey. 


142  ALVAN   STEWART. 

Many  of  the  members  of  the  House  of  Lords,  in  England, 
inherit  their  seat  to  legislate  for  their  countrymen,  by  the 
same  law  by  which  they  hold  their  father's  estates.  They 
inherit  both.  They  inherit  judicial  power,  wise  or  foolish,  as 
a  court  of  dernier  ressort,  to  reverse  the  decisions  of  the 
chancellor  and  twelve  judges  of  England,  on  a  statute  which 
these  members  of  the  House  of  Lords  inherited  power  to 
make.  In  England,  nothing  but  idiocy,  insanity  or  crime 
can  deprive  some  four  or  five  hundred  Englishmen  from 
being  Jaw-makers  and  judges  in  the  last  resort;  and  that, 
too,  without  the  express  consent  of  a  living  man  in  England 
manifested  in  their  favor,  but  barely  by  inheritance. 

The  feudal  system,  primogeniture,  and  that  certain  persons 
inherited  the  executive,  judiciary  and  legislative  powers  of 
their  country,  and  also  inherited  the  allegiance  and  obedience 
of  the  nation,  have  been  the  fundamental  laws  of  most  Euro- 
pean countries  from  the  downfall  of  the  Roman  Empire  to 
this  hour. 

Look  at  England  and  her  colonies  of  fifty  millions  of  inhabi- 
tants, and  her  East  India  possessions  of  one  hundred  millions 
more,  making  one  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  human  beings, 
or  one-fifth  of  the  human  race,  at  the  head  of  which,  by  force 
of  the  above  doctrine,  as  Queen,  is  a  young  boarding-school, 
piano-playing  girl,  eighteen  years  of  age,  with  power  to 
declare  war  and  deluge  the  world  in  blood,  make  peace,  veto 
the  united  legislation  of  Lords  and  Commons  in  Parliament 
assembled,  to  direct  fleets  and  lead  armies. 

The  doctrine  of  this  world  on  the  3d  of  July,  1776,  was, 
that  some  persons  are  created  superior  to  others,  inheriting 
the  right  to  make,  judge  of,  and  execute  laws,  which  the 
rest  are  created  to  obey. 

But  before  the  sun  went  down  on  the  4th  of  July,  1776, 
the  mighty  moral  discovery  was  proclaimed  from  this  very 
city,  that  "  all  men  are  created  equal,  and  endowed  by  their 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT   AND   WRONG.       143 

Creator  with  certain  inalienable  rights,  among  which  are  life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness ;  that  to  secure  these 
rights,  governments  are  instituted  among  men,  deriving  their 
just  power  from  the  consent  of  the  governed." 

Such  men  as  Milton,  a  Sydney,  and  a  Russell,  in  their 
musings  upon  the  rights  of  humanity,  had  caught  glimpses  of 
this  truth — shadowy  and  undefined,  like  the  vision  which 
passed  before  the  face  of  Eliphaz  the  Temanite — a  spirit 
passed  before  them,  "  but  the  form  thereof  was  not  dis- 
cerned." They  had  prophet  revelations  of  the  dawning  of  a 
better  day.  Looking  down  the  vast  future,  they  beheld  OR 
those  plains  in  the  land  of  the  setting  sun,  beyond  the  wilder- 
ness of  waters,  where  Hesperus  trembles  on  the  borders  of 
the  circling  heavens,  man  in  full  possession  of  the  great  charter 
of  his  rights. 

This  mighty  discovery  is  but  a  DEFINITION  OF  MAN,  as  con- 
sidered in  relation  to  every  other  man.  But  no  great  poli- 
tician or  philosopher  in  the  European  world  dared  make  this 
definition  known,  because  it  would  have  been  high  treason 
against  the  fundamental  laws  of  European  society.  This  defi- 
nition would  have  brought  to  the  block  the  best  man  in 
Europe,  as  the  reward  of  his  temerity. 

The  three  great  truths,  or  political  discoveries,  are:  1st. 
Equality  at  birth.  2d.  The  universal  endowment  of  the 
right  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  3d.  That 
all  governments  should  be  made  to  secure  these  high  inter- 
ests. Therefore,  all  governments  must  be  made  by  those 
whose  interests  they  are  intended  to  secure.  "Well  might  the 
politicians,  philosophers,  and  philanthropists,  believe  the  phi- 
losopher's stone  had  at  last  been  discovered ;  and  that  the 
signers  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  had  been  per- 
mitted to  ascend,  like  Moses,  into  the  Mount  of  God,  to  dis- 
cover, from  a  loftier  altitude,  the  relations  of  man  to  man. 
Good  men  cried  out  in  ecstasy,  from  every  corner  of  the 


144  ALVAN   STEWART. 

earth  where  the  human  mind  was  not  so  degraded  as  to  have 
forgotten  the  loftiness  of  its  lineage. 

The  new  and  joyful  era  had  arrived,  in  which  the  governed, 
to  protect  his  liberty,  his  life,  and  pursuit  of  happiness,  made 
and  created  the  governor.  THIS  is  A  REPUBLICAN  FORM  OF 
GOVERNMENT.  The  purchase  money  of  this  truth  was  paid  in 
blood,  which  flowed  from  the  free  hearts  of  our  fathers.  Oh, 
costly  definition  of  human  liberty !  The  assertion  of  this 
gVeat  definition  of  man,  in  his  social  state,  is,  by  force  of  its 
terms,  the  abolition  of  all  slavery,  wherever  the  definition  is 
honored  or  respected. 

But  with  us  this  definition  of  human  rights  is,  practically, 
but  an  empty  abstraction,  instead  of  being  the  very  life  of 
our  republicanism  ? 

To  tolerate  slavery  a  single  year  in  one  of  these  States, 
after  this  Declaration  of  Independence,  was  a  base  hypocrisy, 
a  violation  of  our  engagements  to  mankind,  and  to  God. 
"  And  for  the  support  of  this  Declaration,"  said  they, 
"with  a  firm  reliance  on  the  protection  of  Divine  Provi- 
dence, we  mutually  pledge  to  each  other  our  lives,  our  for- 
tunes, and  our  sacred  honor." 

This  awful  and  solemn  promise,  made  in  behalf  of  liberty, 
to  all  persons  in  this  land,  in  the  presence  of  mankind  and  the 
great  Jehovah,  in  that  awful  moment  of  a  nation's  agony  and 
peril,  stands  unredeemed,  uncancelled,  and  unsatisfied  ;  sixty- 
one  years  and  three  hundred  and  fifteen  days  have  gone  to 
join  the  years  and  days  beyond  the  flood;  every  year,  every 
month,  yea,  every  day  and  hour,  have  gone  to  the  Judge  of 
all  the  earth,  clamoring,  long  and  loud,  for  the  execution  of 
this  vow. 

The  issue  of  1776  was  not  alone  between  the  governments 
of  the  old  world,  and  their  children,  the  colonies  of  the  new. 
This  issue,  tendered  by  the  framers  of  the  Declaration  of 
1776,  was  done  not  only  for  the  United  States;  but  as  the 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT   AND   WRONG.      145 

representatives  of  human  nature  oppressed,  their  document 
was  the  property  of  both  Americas,  and  of  the  New  World. 
Liberty  for  all  is  demanded ;  labor  in  all  is  honorable ;  tyranny 
is  everywhere  odious  ;  kidnapping  and  stealing  men  and  their 
labor  is  the  essence  of  sin  and  meanness.  Look  at  the  pro- 
ducts of  their  issue.  Behold  thirteen  of  the  United  States 
free  from  slavery ! 

Six  empires  on  this  continent  have  pronounced  that  the 
color  of  a  man's  skin  and  his  liberty  have  no  relation  to  each 
other,  and  that  all  men  are  created  equal  and  free,  to  wit — 
Mexico,  New  Granada,  Central  America,  Venezuela,  Chili  and 
Peru.  These  blood-bought  countries  have  started  the  great 
journey  of  liberty  and  independence,  with  slavery  abolished 
throughout  their  great  domains.  In  fact,  the  continent  is  an 
abolition  continent ;  the  Catholic  countries,  in  the  march  of 
liberty,  have  gone  beyond  this  land  of  boasting  Protest- 
antism. 

Under  the  glorious  issue,  framed  by  the  fathers  of  indepen- 
dence, that  all  men  are  created  equal,  the  bondmen  of  Massa- 
chusetts, of  Connecticut,  of  Nev?  York,  of  Pennsylvania,  and 
of  New  Jersey,  have  thrown  down  their  broken  yokes,  as  the 
trophies  of  the  great  definition,  and  the  shout  of  freedom 
which  burst  forth  and  rolled  in  thunders  through  the  unmea- 
sured prairies  of  the  West,  swept  over  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
and  Mexico  caught  the  joyful  sound,  and  declared  all  men 
forever  free  in  the  land  of  Montezuma. 

The  white,  the  black,  the  red,  joined  in  the  chorus :  ALL 
MEN  ARE  CREATED  EQUAL.  Yes,  five  empires  more  heard  the 
thrilling  sounds,  and  from  the  lonely  mine-digger  of  the 
cavern-worlds  beneath  the  bed  of  the  Pacific,  to  the  solitary 
shepherd  on  the  snow-clad  Cordilleras,  and  from  the  Mexican 
Gulf  to  the  ever-blazing  fires  of  the  Andes,  as  the  eternal  truth 
went  up  the  mountains  and  rolled  over  the  pampas  soli- 
tudes of  the  South,  and  flowed  down  the  mighty  rivers,  all 
7 


146  ALVAN   STEWART. 

heard  the  words  of  resurrection  and  of  life,  and  from  the 
trance  of  ages  stood  up  in  the  primeval  sovereignty  of  MAN  ! 

St.  Domingo  heard  that  man  was  born  free  and  created 
equal,  and,  at  the  end  of  three  centuries  of  slavery,  stood 
erect — a  nation  of  freemen,  manufactured  out  of  goods  and 
chattels.  England,  hi  the  days  of  George  the  Third,  paid 
four  hundred  millions  of  dollars  to  destroy  our  definition  of 
man,  and  in  the  reign  of  William  the  Fourth,  the  same  nation, 
fifty-seven  years  after,  paid  one  hundred  millions  of  dollars  to 
purchase  it  for  eight  hundred  thousand  slaves  in  the  "West 
Indies.  Those  new  lexicographers  who  overturned  the  gov- 
ernments of  the  new  world  by  the  power  of  a  definition,  and 
cut  the  bands  of  transatlantic  connection,  and  turned  the 
world  upside  down,  and  unlocked  suffering  humanity  and 
delivered  it  from  its  prison-house,  if  they  could  be  summoned 
from  the  long  "dreamless  sleep  of  their  graves,  would  be  over- 
come with  astonishment  to  find  thirteen  States  of  this  republic 
still  clinging  to  slavery  with  a  death-grasp  ;  and  that  their 
declaration,  which  had  driven  slavery  from  all  other  parts  of 
the  continent,  was  unable  to  deliver  two  and  a  half  millions 
of  the  most  wretched  slaves  the  sun  ever  shone  upon.  These 
fathers,  summoned  from  their  graves,  might  well  inquire 
what  is  the  cost  of  this  refusal  by  southern  men  to  acknow- 
ledge our  definition  of  man. 

And  what  would  be  the  answer  ?  The  derision  and  col- 
lected scorn  of  an  insulted  world — the  loss  of  liberty  of 
speech,  and  the  freedom  of  the  press,  and  of  conscience — too 
cowardly  to  discuss  slavery,  and  afraid  of  the  truth, — a  loss 
of  character  for  bravery  and  moral  courage — loss  of  the  bene- 
fit of  the  personal  industry  of  the  whites,  that  being  con- 
sidered dishonorable ;  while  to  rob,  steaf,  commit  adultery, 
and  covet,  are  virtues — the  South  by  slavery,  making  their 
wives,  the  white  women,  miserable — the  slave  losing  the 
benefit  of  the  Bible — the  whites,  by  amalgamation  with  their 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   KIGHT   AND   WRONG.      14:7 

slaves,  obtaining  the  privilege  of  selling  their  own  children, 
brothers  and  sisters  of  selling  their  own  brothers  and  sisters 
— the  fear  of  assassination  and  insurrection — large  sections 
of  exhausted  slave-lands,  with  a  curse  of  perpetual  sterility 
upon  them — a  universal  brutifying  of  the  black  man's  mind 
— universal  concubinage — reducing  two  and  a  half  millions  of 
equals  to  beasts  and  chattels — ferocity,  murder,  duelling, 
called  "chivalry" — the  countless  murders  committed  by 
slavery  during  the  lapse  of  two  hundred  years,  yet  unatoned 
for  and  unavenged — the  white  masters  living  under  the  stand- 
ing charge  that  all  their  wealth,  their  daily  gains,  the  livings 
and  subsistence  of  Congressmen,  judges,  governors,  church- 
members,  men  and  women,  are  made  up  and  obtained  by  daily 
robberies  and  larcenies,  stamped  with  the  infinite  meanness  of 
inflicting  assaults  and  batteries  on  the  slaves,  their  natural 
equals,  to  compel  them  to  give  their  mastei-s  an  opportunity  of 
stealing  the  fruits  of  another's  industry — thirteen  States  living 
by  petit  larcenies.  The  acme  of  human  glory,  in  relation  to 
man's  elevation,  and  the  lowest  depth  of  his  guilty  debase- 
ment, manifested  in  the  same  country  ! 

In  the  old-world  men  inherited,  as  property,  the  three  great 
departments  of  power — to  wit,  the  Legislative,  Judicial  and 
Executive ;  while  in  the  slave  States  of  the  new  world  two 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  irresponsible  despots  inherit  and 
own,  not  only  all  the  political  power  of  two  million,  five 
hundred  thousand  slaves,  but  inherit  and  own  their  bodies 
— the  fearful  and  wonderful  workmanship  of  God — immortal 
chattels,  celestial  merchandise. 

The  slaveholder's  practice  tells  God  He  made  an  undue 
share  of  immortal  mind,  and  it  is  his  (the  slaveholder's)  busi- 
ness to  re-adjust  His  highest  work,  by  increasing  the  brute 
creation,  in  diminishing  the  immortal.  The  slaveholder, 
therefore,  un-mans,  and  reduces  to  things,  beings  a  little  lower 
than  angels.  The  same  slaveholder  would  have  laid  his 


148  ALVAN-   STEWART. 

wicked  hands  on  angels,  and  impressed  them  into  his  service, 
if  he  could. 

Behold  thirteen  States  of  the  American  Republic,  legislating 
for  the  division  of  stolen  goods,  enacting  that  stealing  is  a 
patriarchal  institution,  and  adultery  sanctioned  by  the  Bible 
— passing  the  most  formidable  laws  against  any  person  who 
shall  call  them  stealers  of  men,  of  women  and  of  children. 
The  brute  force  system  surrounds  and  protects  their  awful 
larcenies  upon  mankind. 

I  will  present  another  rather  unamiable  view  of  slavery. 

A  South  Carolina  slaveholder  has  a  son  by  his  slave,  in  his 
own  likeness.  That  son  must  be  deprived  of  the  Bible.  The 
father  employs  the  brutal  lash  upon  his  son's  body,  to  make 
him  work  harder  and  earn  more,  that  his  father  may  steal 
those  earnings,  and  with  them  send  a  missionary  across  the 
diameter  of  the  globe,  to  tell  the  heathen,  if  they  do  not 
repent,  they  will  be  lost.  "We  will  suppose  a  heathen  in 
India  repents,  and  out  of  gratitude  becomes  a  missionary 
himself  to  South  Carolina  to  warn  the  people  of  their  sins, 
heathenism  and  slavery.  But  the  Indian  missionary  would 
be  murdered,  by  lynch  law,  for  teaching  the  slave  and  mas- 
ter the  same  doctrines,  on  their  own  soil,  which  the  master 
at  the  expense  of  making  his  son  a  slave  and  a  heathen  at 
home,  scourged  and  imbruted,  had  obtained  means  to  send 
this  very  heathen  in  the  old  world.  What  would  East  Indian 
Christians  think  of  South  Carolina  ethics,  morality,  or  religion  ? 

THE  NO-TONGUE   MEN. 

But  the  adversaries  of  the  great  truth  of  man's  equality  at 
birth,  have  made  new  discoveries  in  behalf  of  falsehood  and 
against  liberty,  viz.,  that  slavery  is  too  powerful  and  sensitive 
to  be  assailed  with  the  tongue  or  the  pen  of  free  discussion. 
There  are  two  divisions  of  the  no-tongue,  no-pen,  no-discus- 
sion men.  One  party  admits  slavery  an  evil,  but  its  constitu- 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT  AND   WRONG.      14:9 

tional  intrenchments  are  so  deep  and  wide,  and  it  is  so 
awfully  dangerous  to  speak  or  write  against  the  institution  of 
slavery,  that  they  are  willing  to  make  an  assignment  of  the 
liberty  of  speech,  the  right  of  petition,  the  power  of  the  pen, 
the  liberty  of  conscience,  to  the  slaveholders,  as  a  standing 
tribute,  to  be  paid  by  the  men  of  the  north  division  of 
the  confederacy,  for  the  privilege  of  not  being  made  field 
slaves  for  the  present ;  for  the  privilege  of  looking  on  the 
same  sun  at  the  same  time ;  of  beholding  the  same  waxing  and 
waning  moon  ;  although  the  fruit  of  this  assignment  has  been 
wet  with  the  blood  of  ten  thousand  annual  murders,  or  twenty- 
seven  daily  ones,  for  each  of  the  sixty  years  gone  by,  from  malig- 
nant passion,  by  violence  and  over- working  and  under-feeding. 

HOD-CARRIERS. 

The  other  division  contends  it  is  a  Bible  institution,  a  State 
institution,  and  a  corner-stone  of  the  Federal  Union  ;  and 
further,  that  no  man,  woman  or  child,  shah1  deny  these  propo- 
sitions, but  with  the  penalty  of  death,  with  or  without  law. 

This  last  division  of  men  are  the  head  men  and  master 
builders  in  the  Bastile  of  slavery,  while  those  of  the  first 
division  are  the  mere  HOD-CARRIERS  OF  SLAVERY — the  docile 
creatures  at  the  North,  who  are  willing  to  forego  their 
humanity,  their  intellectual  liberty  in  themselves  ;  and  if  they, 
as  northern  men,  are  willing  to  forego  so  much,  they  can  see 
no  reason  why  the  slaves,  for  the  benefit  of  our  blessed  Union, 
ought  not,  as  good  republicans,  to  be  willing  to  forego  life, 
liberty,  wife,  children,  and  endure  stripes,  hunger,  nakedness, 
ignominy,  and  reproach,  from  generation  to  generation.  Ay, 
these  good  patriots  of  the  North  can  see  no  reason  why  two 
million  five  hundred  thousand  slaves  ought  not  to  be  content 
to  be  stript  of  all  things,  and  lashed  over  every  mile  of  the 
journey  of  life,  to  furnish  the  cement,  made  of  sweat,  tears, 
and  blood,  which  binds  the  North  and  South  together ! 


150  ALVAN   STEWART. 


THE   TEMPLE    OF    LIBERTY. 

To  combat  such  weathem-beaten  heresies  and  time-honored 
presumptions  of  slavery,  and  rebuke  the  craven  spirit  of  its 
apologists,  is  the  reason  we  have  come  together  to  dedicate 
this  temple  to  Liberty.  In  the  thirty-eighth  year  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  we  find  it  necessary  in  America,  the  home  of 
the  oppressed,  in  both  senses  of  the  word,  to  erect  a  temple 
of  Free  Discussion,  where  the  philanthropists  of  this  genera- 
tion may  meet  for  high  and  holy  communion  with  the  God  of 
Freedom,  and  beseech  his  aid  in  the  emancipation  of  the 
slave  ! 

Yes,  in  a  land  on  whose  door-posts  and  gates  liberty  is 
inscribed,  and  among  a  people  in  whose  mouths  liberty  and 
equality  find  so  permanent  an  abode — in  such  a  land  this 
edifice  is  necessary,  in  order  to  welcome  humanity  and  liberty 
to  a  home  they  may  call  their  own.  What  will  the  slave- 
holder think  as  he  passes  this  temple  built  for  the  deliverance 
of  his  despised  slaves,  for  whom  he  never  built  a  school-house, 
nor  scarce  a  church  ? 

What  an  array  of  accusations  shall  throng  the  slaveholder's 
guilty  memory  as  he  looks  upon  this  building,  every  brick  of 
which  is  a  bitter  reproach  to  him !  The  mortar  of  the  wall 
cries  like  an  unappeased  ghost  against  him.  The  foundation 
stones  shall  tell  him  they  are  softer  than  his  heart. 

To  this  spot  the  pilgrims  of  humanity  will  come  to  worship 
God,  in  the  land  of  the  setting  sun. 

As  I  entered  your  city,  thought  I,  here  is  the  peculiar 
home  of  the  slave ;  here  are  the  descendants  of  Penn,  the 
place  where  all  men  were  declared  to  be  born  equal.  Me- 
thought,  in  a  sort  of  reverie,  I  saw  a  band  of  fugitive  slaves 
flying  from  Maryland,  wet  with  the  swimming  of  rivers,  faint 
with  hunger  ;  their  tattered  clothing  told  me  that  they  were 
the  unpaid  laborers  of  the  wretched  South.  They  sought  the 


THE   GBEAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT   AND   WRONG.      151 

place  where  they  might  tell  the  history  of  their  wrongs.  But 
the  doors  of  the  noble  Roman  Catholic  pile  of  architectui-al 
grandeur  were  shut  against  them  ;  they  went  to  the  Metho- 
dists' chapel,  because  their  discipline  was  written  by  John 
Wesley,  who  loved  the  slave ;  but  they  were  answered, "  our 
bishops  cannot  listen  to  the  tales  of  slaves ;  it  is  a  political 
question,  we  cannot  unite  church  and  state ;" — to  the  Baptists, 
but  they  could  not  think  of  giving  offence  to  their  Georgia 
brethren ;  to  the  Episcopalians,  but  the  man  in  canonicals 
said,  "  it  was  his  pleasure  and  his  pride  to  say,  his  church 
had  never  been  affected  by  ultraism ;" — they  turned  to  the 
Presbyterians,  who  would  have  opened  their  church,  as  they 
said,  "  but  from  fear  of  disobliging  a  majority  of  the  next 
General  Assembly,  who  might  want  their  house  in  which  to 
denounce  the  Abolitionists ;"  but  directed  them  to  the 
Quakers,  who  had  always  been  their  friends,  and  to  their 
sympathies  they  commended  them.  To  the  Friends  they 
bent  their  faltering  and  wretched  steps — but  they  were  told 
"  they  had  always  been  their  friends,  and  neither  ate  nor 
wore  the  slave's  productions,  but  hoped  no  stronger  test 
would  be  required  of  them,  for  as  to  opening  their  meeting- 
houses to  listen  to  the  story  of  their  wrongs,  they  did  not 
feel  free  to  do  it." 

Oh,  miserable  fugitives  ! — They  have  run  the  round  of 
sectarian  church-humanity ;  none  have  bidden  them  welcome. 
"  Let  us,"  they  say,  "  go  to  the  Hall  of  Independence,  and 
see  if  the  ghosts  of  Hancock,  and  Rush,  and  Franklin  still 
hover  there  !"  But  the  door  of  that  old  hall  was  barred  and 
bolted  by  a  generation  who  knew  not  Joseph.  They  were 
told,  "  it  will  not  do  to  talk  about  your  scourged  backs, 
broken  hearts,  unpaid  labor,  severed  families,  ravished  wives, 
and  murdered  sons  ;  that  is  apart  of the  compact ;  and  if  we 
of  the  North  should  listen  to  you,  the  two  hundred  and  fifty 
thousand  slaveholders  would  knock  this  Union  into  frag- 


152  ALVAN   STEWART. 

ments,  so  there  would  not  be  enough  left  of  our  common 
country  to  make  a  school  district.  Get  you  gone,  there  is  no 
place  for  you  here." 

They  have  turned  away  in  despair.  But  what  sudden 
change  of  joy  is  passing  over  their  sad  countenances?  They 
have  heard  of  this  Hall — this  Temple  of  Liberty  built  for  the 
very  purpose  of  giving  a  hearing  to  the  wrongs  of  the 
afflicted,  those  who  have  none  to  help,  those  about  to  perish ! 
And  here  we  are,  thank  God !  this  day,  in  the  first  temple 
ever  erected  to  the  memory  and  redress  of  the  slave's  wrongs, 
since  this  world  began !  This  is  a  new  place  under  the  suii. 
It  is  pity's  home,  the  abode  of  enlightened  humanity. 

This  is  a  temple  dedicated  to  the  insulted  and  outraged  of 
our  land.  This  will  be  their  future  court  and  senate  house, 
where  their  hitherto  untold  wrongs  shall  come  up  in  holy  re- 
membrance before  God,  while  the  means  for  their  deliverance 
shall  be  considered  in  the  ample  range  of  free  discussion, 
unfettered  by  priest,  deacon,  people,  or  trustees.  No  house 
was  ever  erected  for  a  nobler  or  more  glorious  purpose — 
there  is  not  one  on  whose  roof  the  sun  of  Heaven  shines, 
from  the  Chinese  temple  of  a  hundred  bells  to  the  pagoda  of 
India,  from  the  mosque  of  St.  Sophia  to  St.  Paul's,  from  the 
cathedral  of  Milan  to  that  of  Westminster,  around  which  the 
sympathies  of  noble  hearts  and  the  prayers  of  the  poor  will 
gather,  as  around  this  Hall  dedicated  to  the  Rights  of  Man  ! 

This  is  the  home  of  the  stranger,  the  resting-place  of  the 
fugitive,  the  slave's  audience-chamber.  Here  the  cause  of 
the  slave,  the  Seminole,  and  the  Cherokee  shall  be  heard. 
Here,  on  this  rostrum,  the  advocates  of  holy  justice,  and 
Heaven-descended  humanity,  shall  stand  and  plead  for  poor 
insulted  man;  here  with  boldness  shall  they  untwist  the 
guilty  texture  of  those  laws  which  from  generation  to  gene- 
ration have  bound  men  in  the  dungeons  of  despair.  Here, 
too,  shall  criminal  expediency  be  hung  up  to  a  nation's  scorn 


THE   GREAT   ISSUES   BETWEEN   EIGHT   AND   WKONG.      153 

and  the  world's  contempt ;  that  expediency  which  adjusts 
political  balances  with  the  tears  and  blood  of  slaves,  or  sees  a 
nation  made  homeless  and  exiled  beyond  the  Mississippi  for 
the  purpose  of  securing  its  golden  mines.  Here  shall  the 
good  cause  come,  though  excluded  from  sectarian  churches  ; 
here  the  despised  form  of  shrunken  humanity  swells  beyond 
the  measure  of  its  chains,  as  it  ascends  and  seats  itself 
beneath  this  dome,  and  feels  itself  enlarged  by  surrounding 
compassion. 

This  Temple  of  Liberty,  I  trust,  will  stand  as  a  monument 
of  honor  to  its  founders,  a  standing  reproach  to  the  genera- 
tion of  this  country  in  the  thirty-ninth  year  of  the  nineteenth 
century — a  generation,  whose  House  of  Representatives,  in 
Congress,  could  resolve  that  all  petitions  on  the  subject  of 
slavery  should  lie  on  its  table,  "  unread,  unprinted,  unreferred, 
undebated,  and  unconsidered" — a  generation,  who,  in  a  fun- 
damental act  of  constitutional  and  organic  law,  could  strike 
from  its  roll  of  voters,  in  the  primary  assemblies,  forty  thou- 
sand freemen,  because  of  their  complexion — a  generation 
whose  moral  cowardice,  only  exceeded  by  their  treachery  to 
the  rights  of  man,  forced  a  necessity  upon  the  true  lovers  of 
man  and  worshippers  of  God  to  erect  this  building,  as  a  house 
where  Truth  might  commune  with  her  admirers,  Patriotism 
with  her  followers,  and  Humanity  with  her  friends. 

Let  this  Hall  be  like  a  moral  furnace,  in  which  the  fires  of 
free  discussion  shall  burn  night  and  day,  and  purify  public 
opinion  of  the  base  alloy  of  expediency,  and  all  those  inver- 
sions of  truth,  by  which  first  principles  are  surrendered  in 
subserviency  to  popular  prejudice,  or  crime  ! 

Let  the  gratitude  of  every  lover  of  his  country  be  expressed 
toward  the  gentlemen,  who,  in  erecting  this  building,  have 
in  the  most  solemn  manner  rebuked  a  guilty  age.  As  brick 
after  brick  shall  molder  away,  may  the  coming  generations 
of  mankind  furnish  men  who  shall  restore  the  perished  brick, 
7* 


154  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

the  time-worn  stone,  and  wasted  wood  of  this  temple,  until 
wrong  and  crime  shall  be  banished  from  our  country,  and  the 
eye  of  the  Angel  of  Freedom,  gazing  over  its  vast  extent  of 
territory,  from  the  St.  Croix  to  the  Mexican  Gulf,  and  from 
the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific,  looks  down  upon  no  slave  ! 


EXTEACTS  FEOM  LETTERS  TO  SAMUEL  WEBB, 

OF  PHILADELPHIA. 

UTICA,  20</t  May,  1838. 
DEAK  WEBB: 

The  moment  I  was  leaving  home  for  Herkimer  County, 
I  went  to  the  post-office,  and  what  did  I  find  ?  Your  letter 
confirming  what  I  had  heard  the  night  before.  Alas,  alas, 
for  Philadelphia !  Has  she  become  the  captive  of  slavery  ? 
Is  this  the  gratitude  shown  to  Philadelphia  for  harboring, 
protecting  and  defending  500  slaveholders  in  her  bosom? 
Yes,  the  unpaid  labor  of  the  slave  has  been  employed  by  the 
slaveholder  to  madden  a  ferocious  populace  to  be  guilty  of 
Heaven-daring  deeds,  which  only  find  a  parallel  in  the  atroci- 
ties of  the  French  Revolution. 

The  home  of  piety  and  humanity,  and  the  refuge  of 
oppressed  men — a  home  fit  for  the  spirits  of  the  blessed — has 
been  burnt  by  the  paid  stipendiaries  of  brutal,  vindictive 
slaveholders — the  life-guards  of  Pandemonium.  The  ashes 
of  Franklin,  Rush,  Rittenhouse,  their  tombs  and  memories 
are  now  in  the  keeping  of  a  mob,  encouraged  and  sustained 
by  the  knights  of  the  lash. 

I  trembled  for  you,  your  wife  and  children.  I  have  shed 
tears  of  joy  that  you  and  yours  are  safe.  What  is  property 
compared  with  your  precious  lives.  I  have  been  through 
a  somewhat  similar  scene. 

Will  not  God  overrule  this  outbreaking  of  the  wrath  of 
man,  for  the  advancement  of  the  great  and  holy  principles  of 
eternal  liberty?  The  plough  has,  indeed,  gone,  beam-deep, 
over  Philadelphia.  Now  you  can  conquer  your  hardened 


156  ALVAN   STEWART. 

city.  Men  will  come  to  their  senses.  This  will  add  thou- 
sands of  bold  and  true  friends  to  our  cause.  Slavery  itself 
will  be  burnt  out  at  last. 

Oh,  what  a  tale  to  float  on  the  four  winds  of  Heaven ! 
what  an  act  to  be  related  in  the  old  world ! 

It  would  be  a  proud  spectacle  to  see  you  draw  a  draft  for 
a  new  and  nobler  hall,  while  the  smoke  of  the  first  ascended 
like  that  of  a  mighty  furnace  to  Heaven,  Give  my  most 
profound  and  affectionate  respects  to  all  your  co-workers  in 
this  holy  enterprise.  Be  of  good  courage.  The  great  moral 
battle  is  yours.  God  is  with  you.  The  voice  of  the  civi- 
lized world  is  with  you.  The  eyes  of  angels  and  men  of  the 
upper  and  this  lower  world  a"re  on  you.  The  eyes  of  posterity 
will  often  moisten  as  they  read  the  tragic  page  in  which  you 
are  the  conspicuous  actors.  But,  go  on.  The  slave  and  the 
freeman  all  look  to  you  to  build  a  second  hall  to  Liberty.  I 
feel  identified  with  your  new  Phoenix  temple.  They  will  not 
burn  another.  Public  sentiment  will  roll  over  them. 


16  June,  1838,  UTICA. 
DEAR  FRIEND: 

I  snatch  the  fii-st  moment  that  my  pressing  engagements 
and  a  journey,  in  and  out,  of  1,200  miles,  with  my  wife  and 
daughter,  have  allowed,  to  enjoy  the  satisfaction  I  now  feel,  in 
answering  your  second  and  third  letters,  which  have  imparted 
great  pleasure  to  me,  my  family,  and  others,  who  have  had  the 
opportunity  of  listening  to  their  highly  interesting  contents. 
There  is  something  so  ennobling  to  find  you  acquiring  fresh 
strength  and  new  vigor,  by  the  persecutions  which  lower  and 
thunder  over  your  head  and  those  of  your  noble  coadjutors, 
that  all  you  have  suffered,  and  we  by  sympathy  with  you, 
seems  to  be  a  cheap  mode  of  purchasing  the  development  of 
those  lofty  points  of  character,  that  unflinching  firmness,  that 
holy  boldness  and  unwavering  constancy  amidst  the  whirlwind 


EXTRACTS    FROM    LETTERS    TO    SAMUEL    WEBB.  157 

of  human  passion  and  interests.  Yes,  such  remarkable  vir- 
tues as  these  can  only  be  known  in  the  hour  of  a  nation's 
peril — can  only  be  understood  at  the  funeral  of  Liberty,  and 
only  seen  at  the  grave  of  humanity.  The  great  virtues  are 
not  to  be  used  in  the  days  of  prosperity,  but  are  to  be  brought 
forth  for  the  sustentation  of  truth  and  justice  in  an  hour  of 
distress,  when  the  surface-springs  and  bubbling  brooks  show 
us  nothing  but  dusty  and  forsaken  channels. 

On  that  night  when  the  troops  of  slavery — a  northern  mob 
— howled  through  your  streets,  instead  of  sacrificing  on  the 
altar  raised  to  liberty  and  consecrated  by  us  in  the  temple  of 
free  discussion,  their  first  sacrifice  being  the  temple  itself  to 
the  god  of  fire  and  darkness,  whose  willing  subjects  they  are, 
how  I  have  rejoiced,  in  such  an  hour,  to  see  you,  deliberately 
sketching,  by  the  dying  light  of  the  first  temple,  a  second  one 
still  more  illustrious  and  beautiful. 

I  came  from  Philadelphia  home.  The  next  week  I  went 
to  the  Herkimer  Circuit  and  acquitted  a  woman  charged  with 
murder,  and  successfully  defended  a  breach  of  promise  of 
marriage  case.  On  Monday,  28th  May,  I  started  for  Boston, 
and  attended,  three  days,  the  New  England  Convention.  A 
Convention  which  will  do  much  good  in  carrying  out  the  per- 
manent quarterly  subscriptions,  the  libraries,  the  petitioning 
Congress  and  the  State  legislature,  in  adding  to  the  ranks 
of  members,  and,  last,  though  not  least,  in  inducing  political 
action.  All  these  points  are  to  be  made  practical.  Saturday, 
after  Convention  adjourned,  I  addressed  the  ladies  of  Boston, 
and  added  to  the  roll  of  members.  Sunday,  I  addressed  the 
people  of  Dorchester ;  Monday,  those  of  Duxbury ;  and,  Tues- 
day, those  of  Plymouth  Rock,  the  place  of  the  landing  of  our 
forefathers.  Wednesday,  I  went,  at  urgent  solicitation,  104 
miles  overland  to  Concord,  New  Hampshire,  where  the  State 
Society  met  on  Thursday,  and  the  legislature  on  same  day. 
On  Thursday  I  spoke  three  or  four  hours,  and  on  Friday,  our 


158  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

friends  asked  the  legislature  for  the  State  House  for  me ; 
but  I  lost  it  by  thirteen  votes — 115  to  128.  Last  year,  out  of 
150  members,  our  friends  could  get  but  15  or  16  to  vote  for 
our  having  the  hall. 

Gov.  Hill  yoked  temperance  and  abolition  together,  and 
abused  both  objects  shamefully.  On  Friday,  our  friends 
insisted  that  I  should  review  the  opinions  of  their  governor, 
delivered  in  his  message  the  day  before,  and  the  conduct  of 
the  assembly  in  refusing  us  the  house.  I  did  not  spare  them, 
I  assure  you.  Some  forty  or  fifty  members  present.  Satur- 
day, I  came  some  sixty  miles  to  Groton,  Mass.,  delivered  an 
address  on  Sunday,  two  on  Monday,  and  on  Tuesday,  went 
to  Boston  by  Lowell,  forty  miles,  and  spent  the  day,  and  in  the 
afternoon  and  night  went  to  New  York — saw  the  Executive 
Committee  of  the  Parent  Society  and  talked  to  them  two 
hours,  and  got  home  on  Thursday,  at  three  P.M.  The  ther- 
mometer in  the  shade  has  been  all  the  time  for  the  last  eight 
days,  at  from  80  to  90°  Fahrenheit. 

Be  encouraged,  dear  brother ;  you  are  engaged  in  a  mighty 
work.  Do  not  disturb  the  ruins  of  the  Hall,  if  the  corpora- 
tion will  let  them  stand,  for  the  space  of  five  years  to  come. 
These  burnt  and  ruined  walls  will  make  men  think.  The 
nation  is  fairly  waked  up.  We  will  make  politicians  feel  so, 
that  they  will  be  the  first  to  run  with  their  buckets  to  put  out 
our  blazing  halls.  Write,  and  believe  me  ever  thine. 


UTICA,  June  26th,  1838. 

I  thank  you  most  kindly  for  the  box  to  which  you  allude 
and  the  minerals  from  Pennsylvania  Hall  therein  contained. 
We  are  very  thankful  that  you  have  any  scrap  of  oak  or  pine 
from  that  Hall,  the  memory  of  which  will  last.  That  Hall 
seemed  to  be  too  noble  and  glorious  a  monument  for  this 
age ;  and,  instead  of  lifting  itself  as  a  mark  of  the  tempest 


EXTRACTS   FROM   LETTERS   TO   SAMUEL   WEBB.  159 

and  a  target  for  the  thunder-bolt,  standing  from  century  to 
century,  a  great  moral  landmark  on  the  coast  of  time,  up- 
braiding the  surrounding  churches  and  public  edifices,  as 
unheedful  of  the  cries  of  bleeding  humanity,  forcing  the 
world  to  see  that  the  slaveholder  had  locked  up  the  northern 
churches,  and  public  halls,  and  strutted  in  bold  defiance  with 
these  keys  hanging  from  his  girdle ;  instead  of  standing  such 
conspicuous  beacon  from  age  to  age,  our  Hall,  when  the 
slaveholders  demanded  the  key,  as  if  conscious  of  the  con- 
tamination, blushed  into  a  blaze  of  indignation,  and  expired, 
only  to  live  on  the  pages  of  history,  being  satisfied  that  she 
had  done  more,  in  the  four  days  of  her  existence,  for  the 
cause  of  humanity,  than  all  the  halls  and  churches  erected  in 
the  land. 


.too 


KEPOKT  OF  A  SPEECH 

DELIVERED    BEFORE    A 

JOINT  COMMITTEE  OF  THE  LEGISLATURE  OF  VERMONT, 

Raised  to  inquire  into  the  propriety  of  reporting  and  passing  Resolutions 
addressed  to  Congress,  praying  that  body  to  abolish  the  internal  Slave 
Trade  between  the  States,  Slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  in  the 
Territories  of  the  United  States,  and  to  prevent  the  admission  of  new 
Slave  States,  and  Texas  into  the  Union,  by  special  request  and  invitation 
from  the  Vermont  State  A.  S.  Society,  on  the  25th,  26th  and  27  th  of 
October,  1838. 

The  resolutions  passed  the  Senate  by  the  following  vote  :  "  Yeas, 
22 ;  nays,  0:"  In  the  Assembly  they  were  carried  by  acclamation, 
and  no  negative  was  called. 

SPEECH. 

HONORABLE  GENTLEMEN  OF  THE  JOINT  COJUMITTEE  :  You 
are  clothed  with  power  for  the  most  exalted  purposes ;  not  to 
inquire  into  the  propriety  of  a  bridge  over  a  river,  the  suit- 
ableness of  granting  a  bank  charter  in  this  or  that  town,  of 
increasing  or  diminishing  the  tax  on  this  or  that  district  or 
county  ;  no,  your  duty  extends  to  eight  times  as  many  peo- 
ple as  those  who  constitute  this  sovereign  and  independent 
State,  who  are  your  countrymen,  your  brethren,  your  fellow 
beings,  born  in  the  republic,  not  to  its  rich  inheritance,  but 
its  orphanage ;  not  to  its  glory,  but  to  its  dishonor ;  not  to 
its  rich  treasure  of  knowledge  and  religion,  but  its  utter  intel- 
lectual bereavement  and  heathenism ;  not  to  its  liberty  and 
independence,  but  its  slavery  and  loss  of  all  things  ;  not  to  its 
bright  and  glorious  hope,  but  its  blackness  of  darkness,  in 
despair.  In  behalf  of  two  and  a  half  millions  of  your 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  161 

wretched  fellow  men,  found  in  your  own  glorious  but  dis- 
graced country,  the  cry  for  pity,  help  and  mercy  is  wafted  in 
every  southern  wind  which  blows  over  the  lands  of  chains 
and  tears,  and  has  brought  to  Vermont  the  deep  lamenta- 
tions of  the  unpitied,  the  unwept,  and  the  unmourned. 

THE    FREEMEK    OF   VERMOXT. 

To  what  friend  should  the  slave  sooner  go  than  to  the 
freemen  of  these  vales  and  mountains  ? 

The  dark,  unbroken  wilderness,  which  half  a  century  since 
covered  this  beautiful  land,  was  not  removed  by  a  generation 
of  unpaid  slaves — no,  the  white  man  alone  was  the  pioneer. 
The  sturdy  birch,  the  majestic  elm,  the  solid  beech,  the  noble 
maple,  the  hated  massive  hemlock  and  the  cloud-propping 
pine — the  Anakim  of  the  vegetable  kingdom — have  fallen 
before  the  freemen  of  Vermont,  and  made  the  earth  to  trem- 
ble in  their  dying  groans.  Ye  middle-aged  and  aged  men, 
turn  to  your  early  remembrance,  when  the  valleys  and  hills  at 
midnight  were  illuminated  with  the  funeral  piles  of  these 
forest  giants ;  who  was  high  priest,  who  presided  at  the 
sacrifice  ?  The  sunburnt  and  hard  knuckled  freeman  of  Ver- 
mont stood  in  his  sombre  linen  frock,  his  sacerdotal  robes, 
and  performed  the  duty.  No  unpaid  slave  ever  heard  the 
cruel  sound  of  the  master's  horn  call  his  unrested  limbs  from 
his  piles  of  straw  to  his  miserable  toil  in  Vermont.  No ; 
your  mountains  would  have  held  their  breath,  and  refused 
an  echo  to  that  hated  sound.  Vermont  was  the  first  born 
child  after  the  Revolution.  Although  she  came  into  the 
confederacy  amidst  storms  and  tempests,  which  lowered  upon 
her  birth  ;  yet  she  was  born  perfect  in  all  her  limbs ;  her 
moral  faculties  showed  that  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
was  her  noble  sire.  She  was  not  like  her  next  sister,  Ken- 
tucky, who  came  misshapen,  limping,  half  made  up,  with 
rickets  before  her  birth  and  ever  since.  Yes,  those  moral 


162  ALVAN    STEWABT. 

rickets,  slavery,  have  sadly  disfigured  that  sister,  and  her 
unwillingness  to  be  cured  of  her  complaint,  proves  that  her 
mind  is  as  badly  affected  as  her  body  is  deformed.  Poor 
Kentucky  is  not  ashamed  to  steal,  but  too  proud  to  work, 
and  too  dishonest  to  pay  those  who  do ! 

Vermont  has  penetrated  to  the  central  line,  between  the 
equator  and  the  pole,  and  on  the  outer  line  of  the  nation,  in 
the  far  North,  last  year,  sent  up  her  resolutions  to  Congress 
against  slavery ;  those  resolutions  were  truly  the  moral 
aurora  borealis,  the  true  northern  lights,  to  alarm  the  proud, 
terrify  the  wicked,  enlighten  the  ignorant ;  yea,  to  intimidate 
those  rickety  imps  and  monsters  who  feed  and  gorge  them- 
selves on  human  flesh  and  blood. 

Vermont,  in  presenting  those  noble  resolutions  to  an 
American  Congress,  in  face  of  so  much  leagued  malice  and 
cruelty,  appeared  like  an  angel  of  mercy  walking  upon 
the  high  places  of  the  earth.  Who  might  not,  on  that  day, 
have  coveted  the  honor  of  a  birthplace  in  your  State  ?  If 
seven  cities  of  antiquity  contended,  each,  for  the  honor  of 
being  the  birthplace  of  Homer,  then  may  the  man  of  Ver- 
mont be  justly  proud  that  his  State  was  the  birthplace 
of  these  resolutions,  and  stood  in  the  front  rank  of 
humanity,  and  first  as  a  State  which  mounted  the  parapets 
of  slavery. 

Vermont,  before  her  existence  as  a  State,  had  tasted  of 
oppression.  She  struggled  into  existence  under  twelve 
acts  of  outlawry  passed  against  her  by  the  State  of  New 
York. 

You  had  a  double  war  for  your  independence — yea,  treble 
—with  the  British  Empire  and  the  State  of  New  York  and 
New  Hampshire,  each  claiming  jurisdiction  over  you.  Your 
mountains  and  forests  were  your  abiding  auxiliaries  in  these 
contests,  these  mountains,  the  native  abodes  of  liberty,  the 
oldest  citadels  of  humanity,  the  blessed  homes  of  struggling, 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  163 

persecuted  and  unsubdued  freedom.  Look  at  this  State  in 
its  infancy,  sixty  years  ago,  with  but  5,000  men  who  could 
handle  the  axe  or  the  sword,  tearing  down  the  forests,  an 
unacknowledged  community,  contending  for  an  existence, 
while  England,  New  York  and  New  Hampshire  sought  to 
take  it  away.  Yet  Vermont,  the  real  Switzerland  of 
America,  came  into  existence  when  political  and  personal 
liberty  were  prized,  next  after  the  salvation  of  the  soul,  as  the 
greatest  good  human  authority  could  confer.  Slavery,  in  no 
form,  ever  sprouted  on  this  soil.  Physicians  assert  that  cer- 
tain persons  are  predisposed  to  certain  diseases,  so  I  may  say 
of  the  citizens  of  this  State,  on  the  great  question  of  humanity 
now  pending  before  the  American  people,  they  have  a  predis- 
position to  join  against  any  cause  or  question  in  which  liberty 
is  threatened  with  destruction  or  overthrow ;  to  range  them- 
selves against  the  oppressor,  and  with  the  oppressed,  to  seat 
themselves  by  the  side  of  the  prisoner,  and  lock  arms  with  him 
who  is  ready  to  perish.  She  is  ready  to  say  to  the  bond- 
man, "  Entreat  me  not  to  leave  thee,  or  to  return  from  follow- 
ing after  thee,  for  whither  thou  goest  I  will  go,  and  where 
thou  lodgest  I  will  lodge ;  thy  people  shall  be  my  people,  thy 
God  shall  be  my  God ;  where  thou  diest  I  will  die,  and  there 
will  I  be  buried ;  the  Lord  do  so  to  me,  and  more  also,  if 
aught  but  death  part  me  and  thee." 

VERMONT   FOREMOST   FOB   LIBERTY. 

The  resolutions,  adopted  by  the  legislature  of  Vermont,  ad- 
dressed to  Congress,  last  year,  covering  the  extent  of  ordinary 
constitutional  action,  on  the  part  of  the  confederacy,  cheered 
the  heart  of  the  philanthropist,  and  armed  humanity  herself 
with  a  new  power  to  march  to  the  terrible  contest  between 
the  forces  of  light  and  darkness,  truth  and  falsehood,  liberty 
and  slavery.  In  the  character  and  spirit  of  those  resolutions 
the  slaveholder  must  have  seen  shadowed  out,  in  coming 


164:  ALVAN   STEWART. 

days,  his  indictment,  trial,  and  final  overthrow.  Then  he  saw 
a  sovereign  State  march  into  the  field.  Then  the  slaveholder 
found  out  that  the  falsehood  of  the  addleheaded  charge,  that 
the  Abolitionists  were  only  a  few  decayed  old  women,  sub- 
ject to  hysterics,  and  a  few  moon-struck,  fanatical  men,  who 
nursed  and  fed  themselves  on  visions,  and  spent  their  time  in 
trances,  or  lost  themselves  by  diving  into  the  mysteries  of 
prophecy,  and  second  sight,  or  in  writing  commentaries  upon 
Mormon  Bibles.  But  these  noble-minded  men  of  the  South, 
whose  minds  soared  into  the  lofty  regions  of  chivalry,  where 
women-whipping  is  one  of  the  most  distinguished  features  or 
employments  of  that  chivalry  (for  except  in  those  peculiarly 
gay  and  gallant  regions  women  are  not  whipped)  through 
John  C.  Calhoun,  the  prince  of  nullification,  raised  the  cry, 
that  before  the  Vermont  resolutions  were  considered,  by  the 
Senate,  a  string  of  resolutions,  all  split  out  of  one  log,  and  by 
Mr.  Calhoun,  must  first  be  considered,  as  a  counter  state- 
ment, to  those  from  Vermont,  as  a  sort  of  breakwater  to 
prevent  their  consequence !  Thus  the  culprit,  arraigned  by 
Vermont,  was  determined  to  open  his  case,  introduce  his 
evidence  and  sum  up  his  cause,  and  make  the  most  of  his 
argument,  before  the  prosecution  was  heard,  and  thus  fore- 
stall the  judgment  of  the  court.  I  have  no  doubt,  this  new 
and  improved  mode  adopted  by  the  slaveholders  in  Congress, 
of  trying  a  criminal,  would  relieve  the  gallows  from  bending 
under  the  weight  of  many  a  pirate,  and  the  State  prison  from 
the  confinement  of  many  a  scoundrel.  These  highly  cultivated 
slaveholders  deny  the  slave's  right  of  petition  on  any  subject, 
any  more  than  mules,  dogs  or  horses,  on  the  ground  that 
slaves  have  no  rights  to  be  violated ;  no  matter  what  is  done 
to  the  slave  by  any  one,  he  as  a  slave  having  no  rights,  nor 
any  interest  hi  any  rights,  which  can  be  violated,  therefore 
cannot  as  a  slave  assume  to  ask  for  the  redress  of  any 
injuries,  because  he,  the  slave,  has  nothing  which  can  be 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  165 

injured.  He  has  nothing  which  can  be  the  subject  of  legisla- 
tive address,  on  his  own  prayer,  for  to  admit  it,  would  be 
admitting  there  was  something  the  master  had  not  crushed 
and  destroyed,  in  appropriating  the  slave  to  himself.  The 
slave,  says  the  master,  cannot  petition  for  himself  for  anything, 
therefore  the  freeman  can  ask  no  greater  right  for  the  slave 
than  the  slave  could  for  himself,  therefore  the  freeman  can- 
not petition  for  him.  And  if  it  be  right  to  deny  the  petition 
of  the  slave,  in  person,  or  the  freeman  for  him,  therefore  it 
must  be  right  to  deny  the  petition  of  a  sovereign  State,  who 
asks  for  the  same  thing,  yea,  the  whole  nation,  if  it  ask  for 
anything  in  behalf  of  the  slave  who  has  nothing,  and  is  en- 
titled to  nothing,  on  the  ground,  that  the  nation  is  agent 
for  the  State,  who  is  agent  of  the  freeman,  who  is  agent  of 
the  slave,  or  nothing  ;  this  whole  matter  resting  on  a  legal 
nothing,  no  matter  how  high  you  pile  considerations  upon 
nothing,  and  extend  the  boundaries  of  nothing,  to  nothing  it 
must  come  at  last.  In  this  bark-mill  circle  southern  mind 
revolves,  on  the  question  of  slavery.  We  know  not  which 
most  to  wonder  at,  the  gross  inhumanity  it  manifests,  or  the 
shallow  logic  by  which  they  affect  to  maintain  this  proposi- 
tion. Let  us  examine  for  a  moment  one  of  the  prominent 
reasons,  why  there  appears  to  be  such  a  numerous  and  active 
force  upon  the  floor  of  Congress,  ready  to  contend  for  propo- 
sitions, which,  for  absurdity,  are  only  exceeded  by  their 
cruelty,  and  seem  to  mock  all  the  pretensions  which  civiliza- 
tion and  Christianity  ever  claimed  in  their  advancement  of 
the  human  race. 

THING-REPRESENTATIVES   IN   CONGRESS. 

The  American  Congress  is,  withoiit  doubt,  an  anomaly  as  a 
deliberative  body,  in  the  civilized  world.  In  that  most 
august  representative  body  of  twenty-four  sovereign  and 
independent  States,  are  twenty-eight  members  elected,  in 


166  ALVAN   STEWART. 

consequence  of  two  and  a  quarter  millions  of  slaves  existing 
in  one  part  of  the  nation  from  whence  these  twenty-eight 
members  come,  not  to  represent  them,  but  to  oppose  any 
plan  or  project  which  might  tend  to  the  benefit  of  those 
slaves,  to  whose  very  numbers  these  twenty-eight  members 
were  indebted  for  their  seats.  By  counting  five  slaves  as 
three  white  or  free  persons,  as  the  basis  of  Congressional 
representation,  these  twenty-eight  members  of  Congress  hold 
their  seats  as  the  chattel  representatives,  or  as  the  represen- 
tatives of  things  and  not  of  men,  and  possess  or  claim  the 
power  to  silence  their  chattel  or  thing-constituency,  when  it 
asks  or  seeks  to  become  a  man-constituency,  and  also  claims 
the  high  prerogative  of  silencing  their  associate  members  of 
Congress,  who  would  seek  to  elevate  the  chattel-constituency 
of  the  twenty-eight  to  the  man  basis.  The  twenty-eight 
claim  that  it  is  a  distinct  portion  of  their  official  duty  to 
countervail  the  sympathy  and  humanity  of  the  age,  when  it 
shall  manifest  a  desire  to  elevate  their  constituents  to  the 
common  right  and  privileges  of  mankind.  These  twenty-- 
eight  men  come  to  represent  nothing  but  the  congregated 
absurdities  and  all  the  marked  moral  obliquities  of  this  period 
of  the  world.  Let  it  not  be  supposed  I  am  a  stranger  to  the 
fact,  that  the  twenty-eight  assert  that  three-fifths  of  their 
slaves  are  added  to  the  rest  of  the  population,  as  a  constitu- 
tional rule,  for  the  purpose  of  fixing  the  basis  of  representa- 
tion, the  same  as  women  and  children  are  counted  at  the 
North,  for  the  purpose  of  fixing  the  rate. 

These  twenty-eight  men  come  as  a  sort  of  body-guard  to 
lust,  laziness,  unpaid  wages,  ignorance,  heathenism,  the  rights 
of  the  lash,  amalgamation,  prostitution,  the  shooting  down 
unpaid  laborers  for  leaving  their  employments,  divorcing 
husbands  and  wives,  separating  parents  and  children,  the  sell- 
ing men,  women  and  children  by  private  contract,  or  by  public 
outcry ;  yea,  the  right  of  vending  unborn  generations  ;  yes, 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  167 

the  exalted  privilege,  peculiar  to  the  slaveholder,  of  selling  his 
own  children,  his  own  brothers  and  sisters,  cousins,  nephews 
and  nieces,  into  the  most  miserable  slavery,  and  all  and  every 
the  right  of  duelling,  chivalry,  assassination,  murder,  and 
generally  all  and  every  and  each  of  the  varied  and  multiplied 
rights  embraced  within  the  circle  of  the  most  unbounded 
inhumanity. 

These  twenty-eight  Congressmen  are  the  chosen  gladiators, 
to  dispute  every  inch  of  ground,  which  the  humanity  of  Con- 
gress may  desire  to  occupy.  These  are  the  men,  whose 
votes  are  employed  to  gag  the  House  of  Representatives  of 
the  nation.  These  are  the  twenty-eight  men  to  lead  the 
House  on  the  forlorn  hope  of  suppressing  debate,  and  take  the 
liberties  of  the  nation  by  storm,  and  lead  them  into  captivity 
without  the  hope  of  ransom.  These  are  the  men,  to  deny  the 
right  of  petition,  when  it  affects  their  thing-constituency. 
These  are  the  men,  elected  different  from  all  the  rest,  not  to 
favor  but  to  resist  all  measures  offered  by  others,  for  the 
benefit  of  their  thing-constituency.  These  are  the  men  who, 
under  the  pretence  of  preserving  order  and  quiet,  in  the 
glory  of  representatives,  produce  wild  chaos  and  primeval 
night,  amidst  their  maniac  screams  of  Order  I  OKDER  ! ! 
ORDER ! ! !  These  are  the  men  who,  with  oaths,  at  their 
private  boarding-houses,  on  the  21st  December,  1837,  swore 
that  "  if  any  man  from  the  North  (as  your  able  Slade  had 
done)  should  bring  in  a  resolution,  or  a  law,  to  abolish  slavery 
in  the  District  of  Columbia  again,  they  would  put  him  to 
death!!" 

Their  notions  of  government  may  be  inferred  from  their 
favorite  maxim,  that  "slavery  is  the  corner-stone  of  our 
republic."  If  slavery  be  "  the  corner-stone,"  it  is  not  difficult 
to  predict  of  what  materials  the  side,  the  end  walls  of  this 
edifice  would  be  erected,  if  these  twenty-eight  gentlemen 
were  allowed  to  remodel  the  fabric  of  American  institutions. 


168  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

There  are  six  republics  on  this  continent,  in  North  and  South 
America,  which  are  without  those  "  corner-stones,"  so  much 
valued  by  these  far-seeing  politicians. 

Beside  the  peculiar  duties  which  have  been  assigned  to  the 
twenty-eight  thing-representatives,  they  are  expected  to  do  a 
certain  amount  of  bullying,  hectoring,  gasconading,  threaten- 
ing, challenging,  duelling,  rifle-trying,  pistol-practising,  so  as 
to  compel  from  northern  members,  their  profound  respect  for 
the  peculiar  institutions  of  the  South.  They,  the  twenty- 
eight,  are  mechanically,  as  the  clock  strikes  the  hour,  at 
least  one  hundred  times,  in  a  session  of  Congress,  to  threaten 
to  split  the  Union  all  to  shivers  ;  and  at  least  on  one  hundred 
different  questions,  from  the  question  whether  a  dead  horse, 
killed  in  the  late  war,  should  be  paid  for,  up  to  that  of  the 
abolition  of  slavery. 

They,  the  twenty-eight,  are  ex-officio  the  wardens  and 
keepers  of  the  wedges  and  beetles,  by  which  they  will  under- 
take to  split  the  Union  into  pieces  or  parts  to  suit  purchasers, 
from  a  State  down  to  a  school  district. 

The  great  slave  wedge,  we  are  assured  by  these  nation- 
splitters,  would  easily  rive  and  sunder  the  Union,  from  the 
capes  of  the  Delaware  to  the  Mandan  towns.  If  these  men 
will  sacrifice  the  Union  for  their  love  of  slavery,  we  will 
sacrifice  slavery  for  our  love*  of  the  Union.  We  hope,  by  the 
goodness  of  an  overruling  Providence,  that  we  shall  be  able 
to  add  two  and  a  half  millions  of  new  votaries  and  supporters 
of  a  republican  form  of  government,  who,  having  tasted  all 
the  ills  which  may  be  practised  under  it,  may  also  enjoy  all 
the  blessings  which  by  any  possibility  it  may  confer. 

DISTRICT  OF  COLUMBIA. 
MAY  IT  PLEASE  THE  HONORABLE  COMMITTEE  :    We  will  nOW 

look  at  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia.  This  district 
has  been  a  sort  of  man-menagerie,  in  which  the  grand  experi- 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  169 

ment  has  been  tried  for  thirty-eight  years,  by  the  consent  of 
the  nation,  to  see  whether  men  can  be  converted  into  beasts, 
or  things,  by  putting  them  into  the  same  legal  scale,  annex- 
ing the  same  legal  consequences  to  their  acts — except  where 
cruelty  is  to  be  practised,  for  there  the  punishments  would, 
from  their  variety  and  rigor,  assume  that  the  offenders  were 
above  men,  yea,  the  compeers  of  angels. 

One  would  think  the  200  years  of  slavery  and  debasement, 
on  this  continent,  of  man,  in  the  shape  of  a  slave,  was  a 
period  of  sufficient  length,  to  settle  the  question,  whether 
slaves  could  be  learned  to  walk  on  all  fours,  like  the  beasts, 
or  not.  But  no,  the  grandeur  of  his  celestial  descent,  his 
heavenly  lineage,  the  capital  of  mind  the  slave  receives  direct 
from  God,  will  forever  make  an  impassable  gulf,  between 
this  noble,  though  abused  immortal,  and  the  beasts  which 
perish. 

To  suppose  it  necessary,  to  make  a  parade  of  constitutional 
learning,  to  convince  any  man,  who  feels  and  acknowledges 
the  common  import  of  words  and  sentences,  is  to  suppose 
that  nothing  can  be  made  certain  in  the  English  language. 

It  is  clearly  expressed  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States,  that  Congress  has  power,  given  by  the  Constitution, 
to  "  legislate  in  all  cases  whatever,  over  the  District  of  Co- 
lumbia," and  therefore  has  a  right  to  abolish  slavery;  the 
same  right  that  it  had  to  establish  it,  because  that  Congress 
adopted  it,  and  therefore  has  a  right  to  abrogate  it.  To  say 
that  Congress  has  not  the  power  to  abolish  slavery  in  the 
District,  is  a  crime  against  the  English  language,  as  well  as 
our  common  humanity.  The  language  is  explicit  beyond  the 
most  malignant  carpings  of  the  most  fiendish  criticism.  To 
say  it  is  contrary  to  the  spirit  of  our  Constitution,  is  to  say 
that  the  preamble  to  the  Constitution  is  false,  which  says  "  it 
was  ordained  for  the  purpose  of  establishing  justice  and 
liberty."  It  is  as  clear  as  though  it  had  been  written,  "  Con- 
8 


170  ALVAN   6TEWAET. 

gress  shall  have  power  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of 
Columbia."  It  is  one  of  those  cases  where  the  proposition 
is  itself  more  clear,  than  any  argument,  evidence,  or  illustra- 
tion assumed  as  true,  can  make  it.  "  Clarius  luce,"  more 
clear  than  light,  as  the  Roman  orator  once  said.  Whoever 
undertakes,  by  other  arguments  than  the  text  of  the  Consti- 
tution itself,  to  make  it  appear  that  Congress  have,  and 
should  exercise  the  abolition  power  it  possesses,  for  the  benefit 
of  7000  persons,  would  make  the  question  more  doubtful  by 
words,  and  might  as  well  undertake  to  prove  the  existence  of 
the  sun,  by  his  light  reflected  from  the  moon,  rather  than  by 
his  own  shining,  in  all  the  glories  of  noon. 

But  many  will  assert  it  inexpedient  to  abolish  slavery  in 
the  District  of  Columbia,  because  the  slaveholder  is  opposed 
to  it. 

Shall  we  wait  till  the  slaveholder  is  willing,  where  the 
nation  has  the  power  ?  Shall  we  reverse  the  first  principles 
of  our  government,  and  allow  the  minority  to  rule,  and 
commit  crime,  when  the  majority  should  rule,  and  must  be 
responsible  for  all  the  wrong  and  misery  which  they  have 
power  to  prevent  ? 

Is  the  friendship  of  wicked  men  and  slaveholders  more 
important  to  a  majority  of  the  nation  than  an  approving 
conscience,  which  is  the  voice  of  God,  and  the  opinion  of 
good  men  all  round  the  world  ?  If  the  free  States  refuse 
(having  the  power  as  they  really  possess  it)  to  abolish  slavery 
in  the  District  of  Columbia,  it  becomes,  truly,  the  sin  of  the 
North,  of  the  free  States,  and  on  us  rests  the  responsibility 
of  every  pain  of  mind  or  body,  which  may  be  endured  by 
those  7000  slaves,  which  they  would  not  suffer,  were  they 
free ;  yea,  more,  of  the  horrid  countenance  we  seem  to  lend  to 
the  slaveholders,  in  the  States,  where  they,  as  States,  claim 
to  have  the  only  power  to  abolish  slavery.  Yes,  slavery  may 
put  forth  a  very  plausible  defence  of  the  system,  by  saying 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  171 

that  the  North,  without  profit  from  slavery,  permit  it  to 
exist,  when  they  have  power  to  abolish  it,  therefore,  they  of 
the  North  cannot  consider  slaveholding  very  wrong,  or  they 
would  abolish  it,  where  they  have  the  odium  of  its  existence, 
without  the  profit  of  its  continuance. 

DUTY    OF   THE   STATES. 

Gentlemen  of  the  committee,  we  now  come  to  the  legisla- 
ture of  Vermont,  asking  it,  with  great  respect,  to  embody 
and  express  to  Congress  the  desire  of  this  sovereign  State, 
that  slavery  should  be  immediately  and  forever  abolished  in 
the  District  of  Columbia.  Your  citizens  of  this  State  have 
besought  you  by  their  petitions  on  this  stibject  to  lend  suffer- 
ing humanity  a  helping  hand. 

The  peculiar  posture  of  affairs  in  the  present  Congress 
seems  to  invite  the  States  to  come  forward  in  their  highest 
legislative  capacity,  and  rescue  the  Constitution  of  our  com- 
mon country  from  the  most  gross  violations  ;  violations  for 
which  every  patriot  should  tremble  for  the  perpetuity  of  our 
blood-bought  liberties.  The  citizens  of  Vermont,  as  well  as 
those  of  the  other  free  States,  have  sent  thousands  and  tens 
of  thousands  of  petitions  to  Congress,  praying  for  the  aboli- 
tion of  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  the  internal 
slave  trade  and  for  kindred  objects ;  all  of  which,  in  the  past 
year,  have  been  laid  upon  the  table,  unread,  unreferred,  un- 
printed,  undebated,  and  unconsidered. 

CONSTTTUTIOXCIDES. 

Thus  have  the  members  of  Congress,  from  the  free  States, 
bowed  themselves  lower,  in  base  submission,  to  the  footstool 
of  slavery,  than  on  all  other  propositions  ever  before  united. 
But  the  northern  members,  who  voted  the  Patton  gag,  before 
they  got  so  low,  had  to  grope  their  way  down  on  a  ladder 
of  perjury.  There  was  no  other  invention  by  which  they 


172  ALVAN   STEWART. 

could  have  debased  themselves,  and  found  for  themselves 
so  abject  a  point.  It  was  only  by  jumping  the  life  to 
come. 

The  Constitution  has  secured  the  eternal  and  Heaven- 
descended  right  of  petition  to  the  people  of  this  country ; 
not  that  the  Constitution  gave  or  conferred  this  right ;  no, 
sirs,  it  barely  spoke  against  its  violation,  it  threw  its  power- 
ful arms  out  in  defence  of  this  right,  coeval  with  man.  But 
these  members  of  Congress  who  voted  for  the  resolution  of 
the  21st  December,  1837,  to  lay  the  petitions  of  the  freemen 
and  women  of  the  North  on  the  table,  unread,  unconsidered, 
and  unprinted,  must  stand  on  the  page  of  history  in  all  com- 
ing time  as  the  assassins ;  yes,  the  perjured  assassins  of  their 
country's  reputation,  for  the  infamous  purpose  of  upholding 
slavery  in  the  capital  of  the  nation,  and  the  slave  trade 
between  the  States,  in  its  most  diabolical  form  which  this 
world  has  ever  seen,  in  the  long  range  of  600  years. 

'  The  regicides  of  Charles  the  First — many  of  them  perished 
at  home  on  the  scaffold,  others  died  of  misery  and  want  in 
foreign  lands,  the  objects  of  the  world's  contempt  and  scorn, 
for  having  tried,  condemned,  and  executed  their  sovereign. 
These  regicides  alleged  that  they  destroyed  the  king,  aud 
broke  through  the  Constitution  of  England,  in  vindication  of 
humanity  outraged,  and  for  the  delivery  of  liberty  from 
chains.  But  how  much  greater  judgment  should  be  awarded 
against  those  members  of  Congress,  who,  on  the  21st  Decem- 
ber, 1837,  laid  their  sacrilegious,  polluted  hands  upon  the 
written  Constitution  of  their  country,  after  they  had  solemnly 
sworn  by  the  retributions  of  the  eternal  judgment  to  main- 
tain its  provisions— then  to  turn  round  and  violate  that  Con- 
stitution ;  not  as  the  regicides  did  to  aid  human  liberty,  but 
for  the  malignant  purpose  of  transfixing  liberty  to  a  cross, 
and  make  her  expire  in  her  own  temple,  as  a  mark  of  open 
shame !  Before  these  constitutioncides  could  withhold  the 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  173 

consideration  of  the  wretched  slave's  case,  they  had  to  walk 
over  the  dead  body  of  the  Constitution  of  their  country. 

This  generation  is  so  overcome  with  the  bewildering  cry 
raised  against  the  Abolitionists  in  behalf  of  the  southern 
rights,  that  they  have  not  yet  opened  their  eyes  and  ears  to 
the  greatest  crimes  which  have  ever  been  committed  on  this 
continent ;  and  those  crimes,  to  add  to  their  malignity,  have 
been  committed  under  the  forms  of  the  Constitution. 

But  when  truth  shall  triumph  over  delusion  and  the  fanati- 
cism of  a  mistaken  and  slavery-ridden  age,  then  shall  some 
philosophic  Hume,  in  the  next  century  review  the  distress- 
ing transactions  of  this  ;  then  will  the  21st  December,  1837, 
be  reckoned  the  most  gloomy  and  disastrous  day  which  has 
distinguished  the  annals  of  this  nation.  If  the  4th  July,  1776, 
be  a  day  standing  preeminent  for  the  grandeur  of  those  prin- 
ciples which  we  then  adopted,  the  21st  December,  1837,  may 
stand  as  an  inauspicious  contrast ;  if  the  former  was  the  birth 
of  American  liberty,  the  latter  appears  like  its  funeral. 

Behold  the  monstrous  crime  committed  by  the  majority  of 
the  House  of  Representatives  of  the  United  States,  as  each 
member  responded  "  aye  "  to  the  famous,  or  rather  infamous 
resolution  of  Patton  of  Virginia,  on  the  21st  December,  1837. 
This  resolution  was  passed  under  the  tourniquet  of  the  pre- 
vious question,  or  strangled  debate.  The  previous  question, 
according  to  parliamentary  law,  is  intended  to  put  an  end  to 
a  useless  and  protracted  debate,  after  all  have  been  heard, 
and  the  question  viewed,  in  all  those  shapes  and  forms  through 
full  and  free  discussion,  in  which  they  may  wish  to  present  it. 
Then,  if  garrulous  and  prating  members  are  disposed  to  wear 
out  the  patience  of  the  House,  and  waste  its  time,  the  pre- 
vious question  may  be  moved,  which  puts  an  end  to  the  ex- 
hausted debate.  But  here  the  most  important  question  which 
ever  came  before  a  deliberative  body  of  men,  was  taken, 
before  a  word  of  debate,  under  the  call  or  motion  of  the  pre- 


174  ALVAN    STEWART. 

vious  question,  by  which  the  House  of  Representatives  agreed 
that  all  petitions,  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  unread  and  uncon- 
sidered,  should  lie  upon  the  table. 

Behold  five  crimes  committed  by  each  member  who  said 
"aye  "  to  this  resolution,  in  the  same  breath.  1st.  The  Con- 
stitution was  violated  on  the  subject  of  petition.  2d.  The 
previous  question  was  prostrated  to  an  object  diametrically 
opposite  to  that  for  which  it  was  intended,  by  which  the 
members  opposed  to  the  Patton  resolution  (which  was  a  vio- 
lation of  the  Constitution),  were  constrained  to  give  a  silent 
vote  against  a  mighty  infraction  of  the  Constitution,  without 
being  able  to  speak  a  single  word  to  beseech  the  House  not 
to  take  this  most  fatal  and  unconstitutional  leap.  3d.  The 
members  who  said  "  aye  "  committed  perjury  ;  for  they  vio- 
lated that  Constitution  which  they  had  sworn  to  support. 
4th.  There  was  a  special  inhumanity,  amounting  to  a  hideous 
offence,  in  refusing  to  inquire  into  the  condition  of  two  and  a 
half  millions  of  slaves,  or  any  part  of  them,  or  the  laws  by 
which  they  were  deprived  of  the  inestimable  boon  of  liberty. 
5th.  There  was  moral  treason  committed  against  white  and 
black,  bond  and  free,  every  man,  woman  and  child  in  the 
republic,  in  violating  their  rights,  their  liberties,  their  humanity 
struck  down  through  the  sides  of  the  Constitution ;  yes,  it 
was  high  treason  against  the  age,  the  humanity  of  this  nine- 
teenth century,  and  the  everlasting  commands  of  the  great 
Jehovah. 

What  monosyllable  ever  pronounced  by  man  in  any  day, 
in  any  place,  was  so  big  with  destruction  to  all  the  precious 
hopes  of  man  ?  Yes,  before  this  high  decree,  the  slave  and 
the  freeman,  the  sovereign  State,  and  an  American  Congress, 
all  alike,  stood  speechless.  This  was  despotism  in  its  most 
solemn  form,  which  orders  the  victim  to  be  silent,  which  it 
intends  for  sacrifice.  If  the  victim,  the  Constitution,  could 
have  spoken  through  its  friends,  and  pleaded  against  her  own 


VEEM03STT   SPEECH.  IT  5 

violation,  her  brightest  jewel  would  not  have  been  ravished 
from  her  in  silence. 

Open  the  black  and  bloody  pages  of  despotism,  recorded 
in  the  annals  of  past  ages,  and  let  us  see  whether  ever  in  one 
day,  Nero,  Caligula,  Domitian,  Dionysius,  Aurelian,  Bajazet, 
Robespierre,  and  Bonaparte,  those  flails  of  Almighty  God, 
did  roll  back  the  car  freighted  with  the  most  precious  in- 
terests and  hopes  of  man,  as  far  into  the  night  of  barbarism 
and  blood,  as  these  members  of  Congress,  who,  on  the  21st 
December,  1837,  said  "  aye  "  to  the  Patton  slave  resolution. 

The  amazing  criminality  of  this  transaction  appears  more 
dreadful,  when  it  is  considered  that  this  resolution  barred  the 
only  avenue  of  the  wretched  slaves,  or  their  friends,  to  the 
District  of  Columbia,  and  denied  all  access  to  the  slave  terri- 
tories, it  cut  off  the  humane  from  the  hope  of  abolishing  the 
internal  slave  trade,  and  impliedly  forbid  our  protesting 
against  the  annexation  of  that  stranded  mass  of  villains,  the 
cullings  of  the  world's  prisons,  Texas. 

THE   POWEK    OF    CONGRESS. 

The  very  reason  urged  by  the  South  for  her  counting  five 
of  her  slaves  the  same  as  three  of  our  citizens,  was,  that  it 
might  form  a  counterpoise  to  that  power,  given  by  the  Con. 
stitution  to  Congress,  "  to  regulate  foreign  commerce,  com- 
merce between  the  States  and  the  Indian  tribes."  The  South 
contending  that  the  North,  only  being  interested  in  com- 
merce, would  regulate  it  to  the  injury  of  the  South,  whether 
foreign  or  domestic,  and  that  the  South  must  have  an  addi- 
tional number  of  representatives,  in  Congress,  by  counting 
their  slaves,  to  countervail  the  action  of  the  North  on 
questions  of  foreign  and  internal  commerce. 

Under  the  power  to  regulate  foreign  commerce,  we 
abolished  the  old  African  slave  trade.  Under  the  power  to 
regulate  internal  commerce  between  the  States,  we  petition 


176  ALVAN    STEWAET. 

Congress  to  abolish  the  internal  slave  trade  between  the 
States.  Now  the  South  denies  that  Congress  has  the  consti- 
tutional po,wer  to  regulate  commerce  between  the  States,  so 
as  to  confine  the  slaves  to  the  States,  where  they  now  are. 
Yes,  after  we  have  purchased  this  power  so  dearly  of  the 
South  (which  gives  the  South  twenty-eight  additional  mem- 
bers), we  now  find  the  South  denying  its  very  existence  ;  in 
fact,  the  very  consideration  money,  if  I  may  so  speak,  for  the 
privilege  of  counting  five  slaves  as  three  free  persons,  is 
denied. 

"Why  do  the  South  deny  it  ?  Because  it  is  the  great  door 
to  the  slave  Bastile,  left  in  the  side  of  the  constitutional  tem- 
ple, which,  when  we  have  power  to  abolish  it  in  the  District 
of  Columbia,  we  shall  have,  the  same  day,  power  to  enact  a 
law,  that  no  slave  shall  be  taken  or  removed,  or  sold  from 
one  State  to  another,  under  the  penalty  of  perpetual  imprison- 
ment or  death.  What  is  to  be  the  effect  of  such  a  law  on 
slavery  ?  First,  to  confine  the  slaves  to  the  States,  where 
they  are  on  the  day  of  the  enactment  of  the  law.  The  States 
of  Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  and  the  western 
parts  of  the  Carolinas  have,  for  twenty  years  past,  maintained 
themselves  by  selling  their  surplus  slaves  to  the  States  of 
Georgia,  Alabama,  Louisiana,  Mississippi  and  Ai'kansas,  and 
not  by  selling  the  productions  of  slaves,  but  by  selling  slaves 
themselves,  as  the  great  article  of  commerce  to  the  great 
cotton  and  sugar  districts  of  the  far  South.  Now  if  these 
slave-growing  States,  in  the  north  end  of  the  slave  section  of 
the  country,  were  unable  to  sell  slaves,  the  master  and  slave 
could  not  live  together,  the  slaves  of  Maryland  and  Virginia 
would  eat  up  their  masters,  and  the  masters  must  emancipate 
in  self-defence,  to  save  themselves  from  destruction.  Again, 
the  States  of  Alabama,  Louisiana,  Mississippi,  and  others,  if 
they  could  not  import  slaves  from  the  north  end  of  the  slave 
region,  there  is  such  havoc  annually  by  death  among  the 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  177 

slaves  of  the  great  planters,  by  the  unhealthiness  of  the 
climate  and  the  cruel  treafhient  of  overseers,  that  in  less  than 
seven  years,  if  no  slave  could  be  imported,  into  those  southern 
regions,  one  half  of  the  plantations  would  lie  uncultivated 
for  want  of  slaves. 

This  power  to  regulate  commerce  between  the  States,  is 
one  of  the  mighty  powers  of  the  confederacy  which  has  lain 
hitherto,  in  a  great  degree,  dormant,  although  purchased  at 
such  a  cruel  and  bitter  expense,  now  amounting  to  twenty- 
eight  members  of  Congress ;  yet  it  may,  if  properly  wielded, 
become  the  great  battering  ram  to  knock  down  the  fortifica- 
tions of  slavery.  The  power  to  regulate  foreign  commerce 
was  the  battle-axe  with  which  we  sundered  the  neck  of 
the  old  African  slave  trade,  in  six  successive  cuts,  of  Con- 
gress, enacted  at  different  periods  from  1808  to  1824, 

Let  no  one  say  that  the  word  "  regulate,"  as  used  in  the 
Constitution,  may  not  mean  to  alter,  change,  destroy,  abolish, 
or  annihilate.  That  question  has  been  settled  in  favor  of  the 
above  definitions  by  every  department  of  the  government,  by 
both  houses  of  Congress,  the  President,  yes,  and  several 
times  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States.  These 
questions  of  "  regulation "  under  the  Constitution,  have 
been  up  for  consideration  by  our  Senate,  in  forming 
treaties  of  peace;  declarations  of  war  by  Congress,  em- 
bargoes, non-intercourse  acts — this  word  "  to  regulate " 
foreign  commerce,  and  commerce  between  the  States,  has 
drawn  forth  an  immense  amount  of  ingenious  reasoning  to 
restrict  the  word  in  its  meaning,  but  the  Supreme  Court  of 
the  United  States,  as  well  as  the  other  departments  of  gov- 
ernment, have  declared  that  Congress  have  power  to  annihi- 
late and  destroy  any  branch  of  commerce,  for  this  is  one  mode 
of  regulating  it,  if  Congress  in  their  wisdom  see  fit  to  adopt 
it.  The  abolition  of  the  old  African  slave  trade  had  no  con- 
stitutional authority  for  its  exercise,  except  what  was  derived 
8* 


178  ALVAN    STEWAET. 

from  the  Constitution,  which  confers  on  Congress  the  power 
to  regulate  foreign  commerce.  The  regulation  Congress 
adopted,  was  the  utter  abolition  and  annihilation  of  the 
trade. 

By  the  abolition  of  the  African  slave  trade,  the  internal 
slave  trade  sprung  up  in  this  country,  with  more  than  all  the 
horrors  which  belonged  to  this  bloody  commerce  on  the 
African  shore. 

THE   MARTS    OF   BLOOD. 

The  bloody  slave  coasts  of  the  Gambia,  and  Senegal  of 
Africa,  were  transferred  to  the  Potomac,  the  James,  the 
Pedee,  Cooper  and  Ashley,  and  the  Savannah  rivers.  Wash- 
ington, Georgetown,  Alexandria,  Richmond,  Charleston  and 
Savannah  were  the  marts  of  blood,  where  those  human- 
being  contracts  were  made,  where  wives  and  husbands, 
parents  and  children  were  torn  asunder,  and  uttered  a 
frightful  shriek  and  farewell  of  despair.  Yes,  these  towns 
have  been  the  grand  slaughter-house  of  the  holiest  of  the 
human  ties.  When  inquest  shall  be  made  for  blood,  well 
might  these  Chorazins,  these  Sodoms  and  Gomorrahs,  cry  for 
the  Alleghanies  to  fall  on  them,  and  hide  them  from  the 
accusing  ghosts  of  ruined  and  thrice  murdered  families'!  This 
trade  in  slaves  on  the  high  seas,  or  on  the  coast  of  Africa, 
American  law  and  American  humanity  has  pronounced 
to  be  the  greatest  crime  which  man  can  commit  against  man, 
and  has  declared  its  horrid  perpetrators,  pirates,  and  punish- 
able with  death.  Oh  !  honorable  inconsistency  !  That  which 
is  a  crime  of  piracy  three  thousand  miles  off  is  changed  by 
our  laws  by  the  same  lawgivers  and  a  part  of  the  same  code, 
when  transacted  at  home  in  our  own  sight,  and  so  far  from 
being  the  highest  of  human  offences,  it  becomes  respectable 
business,  not  inconsistent  with  the  duties  of  a  private  citizen,  a 
judge,  a  President  of  the  United  States,  a  member  of  any  of 


VERMONT    SPEECH.  179 

the  Christian  churches,  yea,  a  minister  in  those  churches  ; 
such  a  mighty  change  ^akes  place  in  the  criminal  code  of  the 
United  States  by  sailing  through  some  forty  degress  of 
longitude,  from  the  coast  of  Africa  to  the  capital  of  the 
United  States  at  Washington. 

SOUTHERN   THREATS. 

Georgia  and  South  Carolina  threatened  their  sister  States 
that  they  would  not  come  into  the  Union,  unless  the  Consti- 
tution of  the  United  States  guaranteed  the  continuance  of 
the  old  African  slave  trade  twenty  years  after  the  adoption 
of  the  Constitution,  because  they  alleged  they  could  pur- 
chase slaves  direct  from  Africa,  or  catch  them  in  Africa,  for 
half  the  sum  they  would  have  to  pay  the  old  States  of  Vir- 
ginia and  Maryland  for  slaves  ;  and  these .  States  further 
urged  that  they  would  not  come  into  the  Union,  unless  the 
free  States  would  consent  to  become  kidnappers,  and  catch 
the  fugitive  slaves  for  them,  when  they  ran  into  the  free 
States.  For  as  they  had  run  the  slaves  down  in  Africa,  and 
conferred  so  great  a  blessing  on  the  country  by  bringing 
them  over,  therefore,  to  encourage  the  South  in  its  laudable 
undertakings,  the  South  insisted  that  the  North,  or  free 
States,  were  to  act  the  part  of  shepherds'  dogs,  to  scare, 
catch  and  return  their  wandering  flocks,  when  they  came 
into  the  northern  parts  of  the  land.  So  these  chivalrous 
States  insisted  on  three  points  as  "  sine  qua  nons  /"  1st.  The 
African  slave  trade  should  be  extended  twenty  years.  2d. 
That  the  free  States  should  deliver  up  fugitive  slaves ;  and 
3d.  That  they  should  count,  for  the  basis  of  Congressional 
representation,  five  of  their  slaves  the  same  as  three  of  our 
citizens.  Before  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution,  a  constant 
system  of  threatening  was  kept  up,  that  unless  all  the 
humanity  of  the  world  was  violated,  they  would  not  come 
into  the  confederacy ;  and  now  the  cry  is,  that  unless  we 


180  ALVAN   STEWART. 

permit  these  same  States  to  be  considered  honorable  pirates, 
they  will  go  out  of  the  Union.  It  has  always  been  held  over 
our  heads,  in  terrorem,  first,  that  they  would  not  come  in  ; 
and  now  that  they  are  in,  that  they  would  not  stay  in.  And 
BO,  these  chivalrous  States  have  kept  the  North  holding  its 
breath,  occasionally  having  conniption  Jits,  lest  the  chival- 
rous human-flesh  importers  should  become  so  enraged  at  our 
northern  maxims,  contained  in  the  Declaration  of  Indepen- 
dence, that  they  would  run  out  of  the  Union  down  some  steep 
place,  and  get  choked  in  the  sea. 

THE   GEEAT   POLITICAL   DIVISION. 

This  nation  will,  in  a  short  time,  be  divided  into  two  great 
parties  which  will  swallow  all  others  up,  to  wit,  an  anti- 
slavery  one  on  one  side,  and  a  pro-slavery  one  on  the  other ; 
the  first  holding  that  all  men  are  created  equal,  and  that  labor 
is  honorable  in  all,  and  liberty  the  right  of  all ;  while  the 
latter  or  pro-slavery  party  will  hold  that  one  portion  of  the 
country  is  born  to  be  slaves  to  the  other  ;  and  that  labor  is 
dishonorable,  and  a  badge  of  meanness,  and  a  kindred  princi- 
ple with  slavery. 

The  liberty-loving,  labor-honoring  party ;  the  slave-holding, 
labor-despising  party — to  this  complexion  the  people  of  this 
country  must  come  at  last.  This  will  be  the  grand  division 
between  the  political  parties  of  this  country. 

Ye  men  and  women  of  Vermont,  I  know  I  need  not  ply 
you  with  arguments,  to  show  which  side  of  this  important 
alternative  you  should  espouse. 

You  have  always  been  on  the  side  of  humanity  and  justice 
in  this  great  question  of  slavery.  Everything  here  teaches 
you  liberty  ;  these  rocks  and  hills,  these  inexorable  winters- 
all  command  you,  as  from  above,  to  be  industrious,  laborious, 
frugal,  and  just.  Your  position  and  soil  are  perpetual  gua- 
ranties that  you  will  be  industrious,  that  labor  must  be  con. 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  181 

sidered  honorable  ;  where  those  things  exist  men  will  love 
liberty  and  hate  slavery,  or  history  is  a  lie  and  experience 
without  instruction. 

EXPEDIENCY. 

Our  fathers  have  left  us  one  of  the  most  instructive  lessons 
ever  given  to  mankind,  showing  the  folly  of  expediency  ;  and, 
its  wickedness  when  adopted  by  a  nation,  in  opposition  to 
the  plain  command  of  God,  and  the  dictates  of  humanity, 
and  the  sober  counsels  of  exact  justice.  It  may  not  be  un- 
profitable to  glance  at  some  of  these  governmental  gales  of 
expediency,  into  which  our  fathers  and  the  present  genera- 
tion of  public  men  have  been  betrayed,  under  the  notion  that 
present  expediency  required  us,  as  a  nation,  to  use  it  to  com- 
mit crimes,  at  which,  as  individuals,  we  should  shudder.  At 
the  tune  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  the  nation  was 
like  the  great  deep  at  the  time  of  the  flood,  broken  up  from 
its  foundations,  and  casting  off  the  allegiance  that  bound  us 
to  the  British  empire.  Society  was  resolved  in  this  republic 
into  its  original  elements.  3,000,000  being  the  entire  popu- 
lation ;  500,000,  or  one  sixth  of  Avhom  had  been,  and  were 
held  as  slaves. 

All  men  must  have  seen  by  our  Declaration  of  Indepen- 
dence, and  almost  every  state  paper,  all  Congressional  resolu- 
tions, manifestoes,  petitions,  appeals,  and  remonstrances  con- 
nected with  our  struggle  with  the  parent  country,  or  the 
formation  of  States,  by  our  State  constitutions  replete  with 
the  general  topic  of  liberty,  which  was  on  the  tongues  of  all, 
and  in  the  hearts  of  many,  that  the  times  declared  the  gene- 
ral expectation,  that  if  our  independence  was  ever  acknow- 
ledged by  the  British  king  and  other  powers  of  Europe,  that 
liberty,  universal  liberty  under  the  control  of  law,  was  to  be 
the  portion  of  every  human  being  in  the  land.  Consistency, 
decency,  self-respect,  justice,  and  the  pleadings  of  our  coin- 


182  ALVAN   STEWART. 

mon  humanity  all  conspired  to  make  us  believe  that  the  grave 
which  we  had  dug  for  the  manacles  intended  for  our  hands 
by  England,  should  hold  those  which  for  150  years  had  bound 
the  slave. 

The  war  of  the  Revolution  was  over,  the  last  gun  fired 
against  a  foreign  foe,  the  States  formed  their  constitutions, 
with  bills  of  rights,  attesting  the  doctrines  of  the  Declaration 
of  Independence,  full  of  the  most  lofty  professions  in  behalf 
of  human  rights.  The  confederation  of  the  States,  a  mere 
rope  of  sand,  lasted  from  1777  to  1789,  twelve  years.  This 
was  framed  during  the  midnight  of  the  Revolution  :  but  out 
of  regard  to  the  slaveholders,  nothing  was  said  about  the 
slave.  Let  us  secure  our  own  independence  first.  But  in 
1774,  the  first  Congress  thought  of  the  slave,  so  far  as  to 
forbid  the  old  aforesaid  slave  trade  after  the  31st  Decem- 
ber, 1775.  This  resolution  was  a  dead  letter.  Nothing  said 
about  slavery  after,  during-  the  Revolution  ;  all  still ;  till  the 
Major  General  was  to  be  appointed  for  the  armies  of  the 
United  States ;  the  North  said,  our  Bunker  Hill  generals 
must  stand  aside  to  oblige  the  slave  ^province  of  Virginia, 
and  bring  the  South  heartily  into  the  measures  for  the  Revo- 
lution. [Let  no  one  think  I  intend  disrespect  to  the  memory 
of  our  immortal  countryman  by  the  statement  of  this  fact ; 
far  from  it.]  Again,  when  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
was  to  be  drawn,  the  honor  must  be  conferred  on  a  southern 
slaveholder,  and  its  composition  has,  for  its  great  merits, 
given  a  glorious  immortality  to  its  author. 

How  small  a  matter  it  would  have  been  for  Congress,  at 
some  one  of  its  sessions  during  the  Revolution,  to  have 
declared  the  slaves  free  immediately,  that  they  might  be 
armed  in  defence  of  the  country  which  had  made  them  free- 
men. History  abounds  in  examples  of  this  character,  in 
ancient  and  modern  times.  Admitting  the  proposition  for  a 
moment,  for  the  sake  of  the  remark  (but  not  as  a  truth),  the 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  183 

Congress  of  the  Revolution  might  have  declared  them  free 
under  the  unlimited  war  power  a  nation  possesses  over  the 
men  and  treasure  of  a  nation  which  is  fighting  for  its  exist- 
ence. This  principle  must  have  been  familiar  to  the  old  Con- 
gress of  the  Revolution.  But  supposing  the  former  masters, 
after  the  Revolution,  had  petitioned  Congress  for  relief  or 
compensation,  how  easy  to  have  set  off  the  land  now 
composing  two  or  three  States.  But  our  fathers  let  these 
golden  opportunities  pass,  for  fear  of  offending  the  South. 
Then  came  the  formation  of  the  Constitution  of  1787,  when 
twenty  years  were  added  to  the  African  slave  trade,  to 
accommodate  the  South,  and  five  slaves  counted  three  whites, 
as  the  basis  of  Congressional  representation.  Then  was  the 
time  to  have  insisted  on  the  abolition  of  slavery,  instead  of 
yielding,  and  adding  tenfold  vigor  to  the  insatiate  hatred 
against  the  ebon  race.  What  if  three  or  four  of  those  States 
had  refused  at  first  to  enter  the  Union  ?  Did  not  two  of 
them  do  it  after  all  our  coaxing,  cringing,  and  miserable 
expediency  ?  They  would  have  come  in  within  three  or  four 
years  after,  and  without  slaves. 

The  other  States  would  have  marched  forward  to  grandeur 
and  greatness,  untrammelled  by  this  awful  system.  And  the 
very  fact  that  we  had  parted  on  grounds  so  honorable  to  us, 
would  have  given  to  the  world  a  most  glorious  exhibition 
of  our  devotedness  to  the  great  principles  of  justice  and 
humanity.  We  should  have  had  God  and  all  good  men 
on  our  side;  yea,  the  approval  of  our  own  consciences. 
We  should  not  have  had  a  generation  at  the  North  at  this 
time  one  half  of  whom  seem  to  be  debauched  in  their  notions 
of  right  and  wrong,  in  relation  to  human  liberty ;  as  much,  I 
fear,  as  the  besotted  masters  of  the  South.  It  was  a  corrupt 
agreement  of  the  majority  of  a  nation,  with  a  minority,  to  crush 
humanity.  It  was  the  most  guilty  compact,  for  twenty  years, 
against  the  guiltless  poor  of  injured,  unoffending  Africa. 


184:  ALVAN    STEWART. 

Suppose  we  had  stood  up  for  God  and  our  consciences 
while  the  slaveholder  had  separated  and  formed  his  slave 
oligarchy,  without  the  aid  of  northern  freemen  to  subdue 
the  insurrection  of  the  slave.  The  troops  and  navy  of  Great 
Britain  kept  the  slave  of  the  West  Indies  in  subjection,  and 
not  the  planters;  and  so  it  has  been  in  this  confederacy,  the 
military  force  of  the  North  and  the  free  States  have  restrained 
and  held  back  the  southern  slave  from  his  liberty.  Again, 
the  slaves,  without  the  clause  of  surrender  in  the  Constitu- 
tion, which  was  another  crime  of  expediency  committed 
against  the  law  of  God  and  our  common  humanity  by  the 
North,  would  have  fled  to  us  on  the  long  line  of  Pennsyl- 
vania, Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Illinois,  not  to  be  pursued  with 
southern  vengeance,  and  met  by  northern  law,  northern  jus- 
tices and  constables. 

No,  if  we  had  withdrawn  all  connection  with  the  South, 
all  countenance,  and  held  back  the  loan  of  our  non-slavehold- 
ing  character,  as  a  cloak  to  cover  up  the  rottenness  of  her 
most  loathsome  deformity,  the  South  would  long  ere  this 
have  abolished  slavery  herself,  from  the  disgrace  it  would 
have  been  to  her  institutions.  Suppose  she  had  cut  loose 
from  the  joint  inheritance  purchased  by  the  valor  of  the 
Revolution  because  we  would  not  participate  in  her  crimes, 
she  would  then  have  stood  such  a  monument  of  corruption 
and  avarice,  murder,  meanness  and  feebleness,  that  there 
would  not  have  been  a  nation  in  Europe  so  lost  to  self- 
respect,  as  to  have  entered  into  treaties  with,  or  acknowledged 
the  independence  of  a  community  whose  foreign  commerce 
was  kidnapping,  piracy,  murder  and  blood ;  whose  domestic 
pursuits  were  nothing  but  lust,  women-whipping,  robbery, 
and  extortion,  who  paid  their  labors  in  kicks,  curses,  and 
lashes,  who  sold  their  own  children,  brothers,  and  sisters,  by 
private  contract,  or  public  outcry.  No ;  the  nations  of  the 
earth  would  have  regarded  them  as  "  hastes  humani  generis" 


VERMONT   SPEECH.  185 

the  enemies  of  the  human  race,  as  the  outlawed  bandits  of 
the  world,  whom  to  have  destroyed  by  been  considered  as 
the  greatest  of  public  virtues. 

But  they  have  been  preserved  from  the  universal  con- 
tempt and  war  of  mankind  by  their  confederacy  with  the  free 
States. 

But  whatever  has  gone  to  save  the  South  from  the  execra- 
tion of  the  world,  has  been  exactly  so  much  deducted  from 
northern  virtue  and  character.  Slavery  has  always  been 
maintained  at  the  expense  of  northern  character,  until  Europe 
now  regards  the  pro-slavery  men  of  the  North,  and  the  slave- 
holders of  the  South,  as  on  a  par,  and  a  stench  in  the  nostrils 
of  mankind.  The  admission  of  Missouri,  Louisiana,  Missis- 
sippi, Alabama,  and  Arkansas  were  all  base  bowings  to 
expediency,  at  the  expense  of  our  poor  sable  brother.  They 
were  departures  from,  and  violations  of,  the  spirit  of  the 
Constitution.  What  have  we  gained  by  blackening  the  valley 
of  the  Mississippi  with  slavery,  feebleness,  shame,  dishonor, 
sorrow,  and  an  unspeakable  amount  of  human  misery  ?  The 
country  at  the  North  and  the  South  is  every  way  the  worse. 
Again,  we  bowed  to  the  South  under  the  famous  tariff  com- 
promise, by  which  the  North  sacrificed  more  than  five  hun- 
dred millions  to  the  slaveholding  South.  They  now  desire 
a  hard  money  government  with  which  to  overthrow  northern 
credit.  "We  lost  from  fifty  to  seventy-five  millions  in  the  late 
revulsion  in  moneyed  affairs,  by  the  unnatural  credit  the  slave- 
holders obtained  at  the  North  by  pilfering  from  the  future, 
and  anticipating  crops  to  be  raised  in  1839  and  1840,  from 
the  large  masses  of  slaves  and  land  held  by  individuals, 
wrhereas,  if  each  man  had  had  his  one,  two  or  three  hundred 
acres  and  his  own  hands,  and  his  sons,  or  one  or  two  hired 
men,  as  in  the  North,  nothing  of  the  kind  would  have 
occurred. 


EXTRACTS  FROM  A  SPEECH, 

BEFORE  THE  GENERAL   ASSEMBLY  OF  THE  PRESBYTERIAN 
CHURCH, 

At  Philadelphia,  in  1839. 

THE  SLAVE'S  FALL. 

FOE  a  man  to  fall  into  slavery  is  to  descend  as  far  below 
the  lowest  point  of  Adam's  fall,  as  Adam's  fall  carried  him 
below  the  dome  of  Heaven.  For  a  slave  falls  out  of  himself. 
A  slave  falls  below  the  capacity  of  getting  up  or  inquiring 
where  he  is,  or  how  he  came  there,  or  how  he  may  get 
away ;  he  falls  so  long  through  moral  space  that  when  he 
touches  bottom,  the  laws  of  South  Carolina  and  Louisiana 
say  he  is  not  to  be  regarded  as  a  sentient  being.  Adam's  fall 
left  him  at  the  point  of  knowing  good  and  evil  as  he  had 
practised  them  both,  and  he  was  a  sentient  being  and  could 
perceive  it.  The  slave's  fall  is  immense,  as  he  goes  so  low 
he  loses  his  manhood,  and  yet  retains  his  shape  ;  he  has  left 
behind  him  all  rational  companionship,  and  is  found  in  the 
same  field  and  on  the  same  level  with  the  braying  ass,  the 
bleating  sheep,  and  the  grunting  swine.  He  hears  the 
neighing  of  the  horse  on  one  hand,  and  the  lowing  of  the  ox 
on  the  other.  The  man  has  become  a  brute. — He  is  stock, 
property,  a  thing — and  can  claim  no  interest  in  the  legs  with 
which  he  walks,  the  legs  are  another  man's — he  has  no  owner- 
ship of  the  eyes  with  which  he  sees,  they  belong  to  another 
man— the  ears  with  which  he  hears,  are  another's— and  if 
anybody  should  rob  him  of  his  eyes  or  ears  or  hands  he  uses, 
he  has  no  interest  in  the  question,  as  they  belong  to  another, 


GENERAL   ASSEMBLY   SPEECH.  187 

who,  if  the  slave  has  lost  his  eyes  or  ears,  or  hands  or  legs, 
must  sue  for  them  and  implead  the  offender,  but  the  slave 
who  was  using  them  at  the  time  they  were  bored  out  or 
exscinded,  has  no  interest  in  the  question.  If  this  male  chat- 
tel lives  with  a  female  chattel,  and  they  should  happen  to 
have  some  little  likenesses  of  themselves,  they  would  be 
called  young  chattels,  who  would  belong  to  the  owner  of 
the  old  chattels,  and  might  be  sold  by  the  pound. 

DUTY  TO   PARENTS. 

God  says,  "  Children,  obey  your  parents ;"  if  the  slave 
parents  were  to  order  their  children  to  go  into  the  free  States 
or  Canada,  Jamaica,  Mexico  or  Barbadoes,  and  these 
children  were  to  obey,  that  would  soon  pull  out  the  founda- 
tion of  our  Republican  form  of  government,  if  it  rests  on 
slavery,  and  let  the  beautiful  superstructure  of  chattelship  to 
the  ground,  with  all  the  rising  hopes  of  the  New  World. 

I  hope  that  the  seven  commands  I  have  pointed  out  as 
inconsistent  with  the  institution  of  slavery,  will  not  be 
regarded  as  the  device  of  an  army  of  fugitive  slaves,  lately 
escaped  out  of  slavery,  by  even  the  upholders  of  slavery  of 
the  present  day.  I  hope  it  will  not  be  urged  that  the  com- 
mand "  children  obey  your  parents,"  is  not  of  celestial  origin ; 
and  that  there  has  been  an  interpolation  or  expurgation,  and 
that  it  should  read,  "  children  obey  your  masters  that  your 
lives  may  be  long  in  the  land  which  the  Lord  your  God 
shall  give  your  masters." 

DUTY    OF    CLERGYMEN. 

Ministers  of  the  Gospel  have  no  business,  say  some,  to 
interfere  with  the  political  institutions  of  their  country,  nor 
common  Christians,  say  others ;  the  men  of  this  world  cite 
them  to  such  expressions  as  these  "Render  unto  Caesar, 


188  ALVAN   8TEWABT. 

the  things  that  be  Caesar's."  "  Fear  God  and  honor  the 
King."  "  Be  subject  to  the  powers  that  be." 

To  be  sure  there  is  an  immense  difference  between  insur- 
rection and  reformation. 

A  general  submission  does  not  foreclose  inquiry  into  prin- 
ciples, theories,  or  dogmas  of  government.  Who  is  so  pro- 
per as  a  good  minister  to  ciy  aloud  and  spare  not,  and  show 
the  people  their  sins,  whether  in  organic  law  or  statute 
cruelly  ?  The  ministers  of  Christ  should  stand  on  the  watch- 
towers  of  the  nation,  and  point  out  that  part  of  the  constitu- 
tion and  laws,  which  runs  athwart  the  ordinances  of  Heaven, 
and  publish  the  crime  and  probe  the  conscience.  Ministers 
of  all  denominations,  in  a  slave  State,  should  join  in  a  univer- 
sal outcry  against  the  slave  laws.  For,  otherwise,  they 
cannot  have  a  conscience  void  of  offence  ;  and  they  become 
the  greatest  of  sinners,  recreant  to  the  authority  of  their 
high  commission,  and  prove  themselves  unworthy  ambas- 
sadors of  Christ.  The  silence  of  ministers  in  relation  to 
the  criminality  of  slave  laws  becomes  unpardonable.  That 
silence  is  a  dagger  to  the  soul  of  the  slave ;  that  silence 
destroys  his  hopes  and  blasts  his  expectations  ;  that  silence 
is  moral  cowardice,  which  may  have  lost  the  master  and 
minister  their  souls.  Again,  this  silence  soon  becomes 
acquiescence,  which  soon  is  apology,  which  is  soon  defence, 
which  is  soon  vindication,  which  at  last  turns  into  a  political 
truth  maintained  by  the  authority  of  the  Holy  Scriptures,  and 
the  minister  becomes  commentator,  conscience  keeper,  ex- 
pounder of  hard  sayings,  until  the  Bible  lies,  at  last,  in  the 
southern  country,  at  the  bottom  of  slavery,  and  the  text-book 
of  authority  for  its  support. 

It  is  a  libel  upon  the  Deity  to  suppose  that  it  is  a  part  of 
his  system  of  Divine  government  that  one  man  should  make 
his  fellow-man  his  brute.  To  say,  that  God,  who  made  of 
one  blood  all  nations  of  men  under  heaven,  and  commanded 


GENERAL   ASSEMBLY    SPEECH.  189 

man  to  love  his  neighbor  as  himself,  and  that  we  should  do 
unto  others  as  we  would  that  others  should  do  unto  us : 
should  tolerate  American  slavery,  with  all  its  odious  defor- 
mities, is  a  flight,  not  up,  but  down,  below  the  dark  founda- 
tions of  hell,  which  is  paved  with  Slaveholding  Divinity — 
yea,  tracts  full  of  such  theology  would  make  Lucifer  light  his 
brimstone  lamp  to  read  them — and  he  would  distribute  them 
to  each  ruined  maniac  spirit,  chained  in  his  eternal  cell, 
throughout  his  dark  dominions,  whose  terrific  yell  of  fiendish 
delight  would  make  the  pit,  box  and  galleries  of  all  perdition 
tremble  with  an  improved  sensation. 

JUDICIAL   MURDER. 

The  unoffending  fugitive,  who  is  outlawed  by  a  southern 
county  court  proceeding,  if  he  does  not  return  to  his 
master  by  a  day  certain,  (and  as  a  matter  of  course  he 
knows  nothing  of  this  legal  faroe,  of  which  he  is  never 
notified),  he  becomes  as  a  "  caput  lupinum  "  a  wolfs  head, 
any  man  may  shoot  him  down.  As  though  the  natural 
ferocity  was  not  enough  in  a  slave  holding  country,  I  have 
seen  in  the  last  two  years  not  less  than  six  cases,  in  which 
the  master  offered  a  reward  of  from  $20  to  $100  to  any  one 
who  would  hunt  and  shoot  down  his  outlawed  slave  and 
bring  him  the  head  of  the  slave,  so  that  he  might  identify 
him.  What  shall  be  said  of  the  editor  or  the  printer  who 
could  prostitute  the  art  of  printing,  and  who,  for  two  dollars, 
the  price  of  printing  such  a  notice,  could  become  accessory 
before  the  fact,  to  a  murder  ?  What  can  we  think  of  a  com- 
munity which  would  patronize  such  papers,  or  of  the  state  of 
religion  and  morals,  where  the  law  declared  murder  lawful, 
as  in  these  cases  ;  or  of  the  judges  at  the  county  court  who 
could  prepare  a  general  commission  authorizing  the  whole 
community  to  spring  upon  and  murder  the  most  innocent 
and  defenceless  man  in  the  world,  whose  only  crime  is,  that 


190  ALVAN    STKWAUT. 

he  thinks  he  has  a  better  right  to  the  use  of  his  legs  and 
hands  than  any  mortal  on  earth.  Fellow-traveller  to  eter- 
nity— fellow-Christian,  this  is  a  part  of  the  judicial  system, 
supposed  necessary  to  thunder  forth  from  Slavery's  Vatican 
its  decrees  against  the  man  who  is  unwilling  to  be  beaten, 
whipped  and  starved  as  a  slave  ;  but  prefers  his  liberty. 

I  am  prepared  to  say  there  is  not  such  a  God-contemning, 
heaven  and  earth-insulting  statute  to  be  found  out  of  the 
southern  States,  in  the  four  quarters  of  the  civilized  or  un- 
civilized world. 

The  various  modes  of  murder  of  the  fugitive  slave,  judicial 
or  otherwise,  have  no' parallel  in  the  annals  of  the  nineteenth 
century  ;  and  where  we  boast  over  the  ancients  of  our  steam, 
which  has  made  the  ends  of  the  world  neighbors,  despising 
currents,  laughing  at  tides,  and  disobeying  the  winds ;  which 
carries,  at  horse-race  speed,  a  brigade  of  men  across  the  land 
on  a  railroad,  by  the  partnership  power  of  a  cord  of  wood 
and  a  hogshead  of  water,  with  all  the  other  wonderful  things, 
still  this  moral  blot  is  wider,  and  throws  into  the  shade  more 
true  greatness,  than  all  the  discoveries  of  the  world  could  or 
can  boast. 

These  bloody  laws  carry  us  back  to  barbarism — ah  !  barbar- 
ism itself  would  be  so  ashamed  of  such  laws,  that  it  would 
open  to  the  right  and  left,  and  beg  these  slave  States  to  pass 
through  their  ranks  without  claiming  any  authority  or  prece- 
dent for  these  refined  acts  of  legislative  and  judicial  murder 
from  any  act  of  barbarism,  ancient  or  modern. 

SLAVEHOLDING   CATECHISM. 

Let  our  catechism  be  altered  so  as  to  read  "  Man's  chief 
end  is  to  glorify  God,  and  enjoy  him  forever,  except  when  he 
is  a  slave,  then  his  chief  end  is  to  obey  and  honor  his  master, 
and  avoid  all  the  misery  he  can,  and  dodge  as  many  of  his 
master's  blows  as  will  be  safe." 


GENERAL   ASSEMBLY   SPEECH.  191 


RELIGION  AND  LEGISLATION. 

The  legislation  of  a  nation  will  rise  just  as  high  on  any 
question,  as  the  majority  of  the  religionists  of  that  nation 
see  fit  to  put  it.  If  the  professors  of  religion  of  this  country, 
or  a  majority  of  the  same,  had  declared  slavery  as  it  is,  a  sin 
against  God,  and  a  crime  against  man  ;  that  the  slaveholder 
was  to  be  ranked  with  the  highest  criminal ;  Congress  would, 
under  its  power  to  regulate  commerce  between  the  States, 
have  said  that  man  could  not  be  an  article  of  commerce,  and 
that  he  could  not  be  bought  and  sold,  and  whoever  did  sell 
or  use  a  man  as  an  article  of  property  or  merchandise  should 
be  punished  with  death,  or  in  the  State  Prison  for  life ; 
slavery  would  have  been  brought  to  an  end  notwithstanding 
the  power  of  State  institutions,  as  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States,  and  the  laws  made  under  it,  are  paramount  to 
the  constitution  of  the  States,  or  their  legislation  under  them. 
Are  not  the  leading  denominations,  the  Methodist,  Baptist, 
Episcopalians,  Presbyterians  and  Congregatioualists  (the  last 
two  considered  as  one)  equal  to  two  millions  of  members, 
who  would  influence,  directly,  at  least  eight  millions  more,  to 
which  add  the  two  millions  of  professors,  making  ten  millions 
of  the  Republic :  a  large  maj  ority  of  the  whole  are  thus  brought 
under  a  salutary  restraint,  and  a  correct  moral  opinion.  Look 
at  the  principle  I  seek  to  establish.  What  do  the  clergy,  and 
professors  of  religion  say,  in  relation  to  murder,  robbery, 
stealing,  false  swearing,  fraud,  swindling  ?  The  good  man,  in 
the  pulpit  or  out,  utters  the  condemnation  of  these  crimes, 
and  legislation  follows  and  prescribes. 

The  clergy  all  speak  against  the  desecration  of  the  Sabbath 
day,  and  profane  swearing ;  legislation  followed  to  pass  penal 
acts  to  punish  those  offences. 

Duelling  in  all  the  northern  States  has  been  the  frequent 
theme  of  pulpit  remarks  and  condemnation  ;  laws  of  a  high 


192  ALVAtf   STEWAKT. 

and  severe  character  now  do  honor  to  the  northern  statute 
book ;  and  the  offence  is  now  unknown.  •  The  clergy  and 
religious  men  thundered  their  denunciations  against  lotteries  ; 
and  legislation  came  and  obeyed  the  public  will,  and  lotteries 
are  unknown  in  the  North. 

Legislation  rises  and  goes  forward  in  all  countries,  what- 
ever the  form  of  religion ;  whether  Roman  Catholic,  Moham- 
medan, Hindostanee,  Pagan,  Jew,  or  Christian,  exactly  as 
high  on  all  questions  of  morality,  prejudice,  superstition  or 
true  Christianity,  as  the  public  sentiment  of  the  general  reli- 
gion of  the  country  will  carry  it. 

This  being  an  admitted  truth,  what  a  tremendous  responsi- 
bility rests  on  the  majority  of  the  professors  of  religion  in  this 
country  ?  Slavery  would  long  since  have  ceased  to  have  cov- 
ered this  land  with  misery,  wretchedness,  crime  and  heathen- 
ism, had  the  Christian  public  bodies  and  individuals  expressed 
their  detestation  of  the  crime,  and  its  criminals.  That  black 
cloud  surcharged  with  artillery  of  the  upper  world,  would  not 
have  been  ready  to  descend  on  this  doomed  land ;  it  would 
have  passed  away  before  the  Christian  rebuke  of  this  nation  ; 
but  no,  the  poor  slave  has  not  had  the  Christian's  pity,  nor  his 
enemies  the  Christian's  censure.  Had  Christians  performed 
their  duty,  and  expressed  their  abhorrence  of  slavery  in  their 
united  and  individual  capacity,  we  should  not  have  seen  our 
young  and  noble  Constitution  disgraced  by  a  shameful  viola- 
tion of  the  important  right  of  petition,  for  three  successive 
winters.  Nor  should  we  have  witnessed  official  perjury  in 
members  of  Congress,  who  were  guilty  in  the  face  of  their 
recorded  oaths,  in  heaven  and  on  earth,  by  meeting  the  peti- 
tioner at  the  portal  of  his  country's  audience  chamber,  and 
denying  him  admission  and  shutting  that  door  in  his  face,  by 
the  command  of  the  dark  spirit  of  slavery. 

Nor  should  we  have  seen  eight  new  slave  States  admitted 
to  the  privileges  of  this  confederacy,  nor  should  we  have  seen 


GENERAL    ASSEMBLY    SPEECH.  193 

500,000  slaves  increase  to  three  millions,  unchecked,  nor  should 
we  have  seen  Presidential  candidates,  on  their  prostrate  knees, 
licking  up  the  saliva  of  the  monster,  and  see  and  hear  the 
candidates  saying  to  the  monster,  "  your  froth,  your  whips, 
tears,  blood,  murder,  are  the  beauties  and  sweets  of  civilized 
life."  You  would  not  have  seen  the  priest  of  the  country 
bowing  before  this  horrid  boaconstrictor,  praising  the  beauty 
of  his  folds,  the  grandeur  of  his  coils,  and  the  richness  of  his 
spots ;  and  as  if  that  was  not  enough,  tell  him  that  he  is  of  Bible 
origin,  and  that  he  is  a  lineal  descendant  of  the  famous  ana- 
conda who  held  the  dialogue  with  Eve  in  the  Garden  of  Eden. 

THE  SLAVE'S  CONDITION  HERE  AND  HEEEAFTEE. 
We  act  for  him,  who  is  the  most  helpless  creature  in  the 
universe  of  God,  the  most  despised,  the  most  scorned — the 
slave.  This  is  the  poor  prisoner ;  he  is  sick,  he  is  naked,  he  is 
hungry,  he  is  in  prison  ;  let  us  feed  him,  let  us  clothe  him,  let 
us  visit  him  ;  and  we  are  promised,  that,  in  so  doing,  we  do 
thereby  visit,  clothe,  and  feed  the  Saviour  of  the  world,  whose 
representative  the  slave  is,  sanctified  by  the  Holy  Ghost. 
Who  are  so  much  to  be  loved  and  pitied,  as  one  of  those  fol- 
lowers of  the  great  Redeemer,  who  by  slavery  has  suffered 
the  loss  of  all  things — of  property,  of  wife,  of  children,  not 
dead,  yet  torn  from  him,  himself  a  slave,  subject  to  mockings 
and  scourgings,  who  is  unpitied  and  unrequited  by  the  being 
for  whom  he  toils  the  live-long  day  ;  nay,  he  is  cursed,  abused, 
whipped — called  hard  names,  eats  the  mouldy  crust  under  the 
wall,  sleeps  on  the  straw ;  his  unrested  limbs  are  called  to 
renew  their  painful  work  before  the  glories  of  the  rising  sun 
have  quenched  the  light  of  the  last  star,  and  through  the  day 
he  broils  in  a  sultry  sun  till  the  beaming  stars  of  heaven  burst 
through  the  mantle  of  evening,  and  so  day  follows  day  to 
the  last  of  his  existence.  Child  of  sorrow,  child  of  want,  des- 
titute of  all  things  esteemed,  but  rich  in  a  celestial  expectancy, 
9 


194:  ALVAN   6TEWABT. 

standing  on  the  lowest  stair  of  human  existence,  yet  the 
owner  of  a  heavenly  mansion,  furnished  by  a  Saviour's  love  ; 
though  a  prisoner  here,  he  is  a  freed  man  of  the  upper  world ; 
though  covered  with  stripes  here,  he  has  a  garment  pure  and 
white,  washed  in  the  Saviour's  blood ;  though  he  mourns  and 
•weeps  here,  he  shall  have  a  new  song  put  in  his  mouth  there ; 
though  he  is  faint  and  hungry  here,  he  will  soon  be  fed  on 
the  nectar  of  immortality ;  though  imprisoned  here,  he  will 
soon  range  the  illimitable  paradise  of  God  ;  though  sick  here, 
he  will  soon  revel  in  eternal  health ;  though  friendless  and 
unbeloved  here,  he  will  soon  join  that  innumerable  army  of 
friends,  who  will  love  him  with  everlasting  love ;  though  a 
powerless  slave  here,  he  will  soon  be  a  prince  crowned -with 
glory  and  immortality. 

Shall  we  despise  the  son  of  the  King  of  Glory,  in  exile, 
soon  to  be  brought  home,  with  the  shouts  of  the  redeemed  ? 
No,  God  forbid.  Let  us  do  all  in  our  power  to  lift  up  our 
brother  from  the  dark  and  noisome  dungeon,  into  the  sun- 
light of  equality,  liberty,  religion  and  law. 


SPEECH,    KEYIEWING   THAT    OF   MR    CLAY, 

ON  PRESENTING  A  PETITION  TO  CONGRESS, 
FROM  THE  DISTRICT  OF  COLUMBIA,  1839. 

THE  voice  of  the  slaveholder  can  be  heard  for  the  hour 
together,  without  interruption,  or  those  hyena  cries  of 
"  Order,  Order !"  so  often  uttered  by  the  meanness  of  des- 
potism, to  drown  the  cry  of  throttled  humanity.  How  often 
has  liberty  tried  to  speak,  when  she  has  been  howled  down  ? 
As  liberty  shrieked  in  Congress,  the  fist  of  the  slaveholder 
was  thrust  into  her  mouth.  I  say  shrieked,  for  liberty  has 
never  been  allowed  to  articulate  a  sentence,  lest  the  secrets 
of  the  prison-house  and  the  crime  of  the  ravisher  should  be 
published  to  an  avenging  world.  Only  broken  sentences, 
cries  of  smothered  murder,  crying  "  ho !  help  !"  are  all  which 
has  yet  escaped,  in  snatches,  in  whispers  and  screams,  from 
that  windy  bastile,  an  American  Congress,  where  liberty  is 
brought  to  the  table  or  block  and  beheaded  fifty  times  in  a 
morning,  to  show  the  blasphemous  contempt  the  representa- 
tives of  the  American  people  have  for  their  Constitution  and 
Declaration  of  Independence. 

Yes,  the  Congress  of  the  United  States,  the  most  astonish- 
ing absurdity,  the  unrivalled  despiser  of  the  institutions  which 
gave  it  existence.  A  temple  dedicated  to  the  profanation  of 
every  principle  in  practice,  which  the  nation  professes  to 
adore,  in  the  abstract. 

Liberty  in  the  abstract  is  slavery  in  the  concrete.  American 
constitutional  justice  and  liberty  on  parchment,  mean  atheism 
and  despotism  when  two  and  a  half  millions  of  the  people  ask 

195 


196  ALVAN   STEWAET. 

for  the  benefit  of  the  pretension.  They  extend  their  hands  to 
seize  those  beautiful  apples,  there  is  an  awful  yell  made  in 
their  ears,  and,  in  bewildered  consternation,  the  apples  which 
they  forced  toward  their  mouths  have  become  ashes  and 
poison.  It  is  a  castle  haunted  by  the  genius  of  deception, 
who  pretends  to  have  married  the  goddess  of  liberty,  who 
receives  the  adoration  of  all,  except  the  two  and  a  half  mil- 
lions of  slaves  who  carry  and  hold  up  her  long  train  when  she 
comes  down  into  her  temple  to  be  worshipped. 

But  when  Mr.  Clay,  the  candidate  for  Presidential  honors, 
wishes  to  present  a  petition  against  the  poor  slaves  of  the 
District  of  Columbia,  all  is  silence — the  elite,  the  national 
beauty,  the  glory  of  the  metropolitan  city,  yea,  the  Senate  is 
attent,  and  the  House  of  Representatives  leave  their  hall  to 
witness  the  labors  of  the  American  Cicero,  standing  up  to 
defend  and  perpetuate  the  greatest  crime  man  ever  committed 
against  God,  and  the  greatest  crime  man  ever  committed 
against  man. 

Behold  the  inhuman  monsters  of  the  District  of  Columbia ! 
They  prepare  a  petition  signed  by  a  few  slaveholders,  who 
live  on  the  robbery  of  the  helpless — yea,  eat,  drink  and  wear 
the  proceeds  of  unpaid  and  whip-extorted  labor ;  they  have 
the  unparalleled  impudence  to  place  their  names  on  the  roll 
of  imperishable  infamy,  and  petition  the  nation — for  what  ? 
Ah !  that  they  may  live  by  plunder,  robbery,  by  enslaving 
and  kidnapping  their  fellow-citizens  through  all  coming  tune ; 
and  when  this  audacious  paper  is  prepared,  why  do  they  not 
hunt  the  most  distinguished  brigand  or  pirate  on  the  globe, 
and  send  him  to  the  Senate,  so  that  it  may  b«  presented  by  a 
senator  whose  notions  of  right  and  wrong  run  contraband  to 
the  civilized  Avorld  ? 

But  whom  do  these  metropolitan  desperadoes  select  ? 
Henry  Clay,  the  man  whom  they  supposed,  with  his  deep- 
toned,  organ  voice,  honeyed  periods  and  the  long-reaching 


197 

sweep  of  oratorical  sentences,  might  prepare  this  wretched 
dose,  and  persuade  the  nation  to  take  it  down,  however  awry 
its  grimaces  might  be  in  swallowing,  and  leave  the  effect  to 
time,  when  it  was  fairly  under  way  on  a  journey  through  the 
system.  This  was  something  humbling  for  this  great  disciple 
of  liberty,  as  he  pretends  in  his  speech  to  be,  for  he  appeals 
to  the  Searcher  of  all  hearts  for  what  he  says  as  true,  when  he 
asserts  that  every  pulsation  of  his  heart  beats  high  for  liberty, 
and  that  he  was  no  friend  to  slavery.  How  cruel  to  force 
such  a  man  into  the  Straits  of  Thermopylae  ! 

In  undertaking  this  massacre,  this  murder  of  what  he 
loved — "  liberty  " — ye  little  souls,  judge  what  it  cost  this 
great  lover  of  liberty  to  have  made  a  speech  for  perpetual, 
yea,  everlasting  slavery,  slavery  to-day,  to-morrow  and  for- 
ever, with  that  burning  love  of  liberty  which  consumed  his 
very  vitals  from  the  intensity  of  its  heat  and  the  fervor  of  its 
flame,  and  baked  his  clay  till  it  melted.  No  ordinary  indi- 
vidual could  be  selected  for  this  task.  If  I  am  not  much 
mistaken,  this  petition  was  gotten  up  at  the  instance  of  the 
slaveholding  orator,  to  furnish  the  gentleman  an  opportunity 
to  make  a  speech,  the  popularity  of  which  should  settle,  in 
his  own  estimation,  the  question  of  his  being  the  next  Presi- 
dent ;  so  that,  in  the  fortieth  year  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
a  speech  is  made  expressly  by  a  candidate  for  the  Presidency 
of  this  country,  in  which  the  great  leading  thought  is  to 
make  the  most  outrageous  slavery — American  slavery — 
perpetual,  as  long  as  the  sun  and  moon  shall  endure,  as  long 
as  this  earth  shall  make  its  annual  journey  through  the 
ecliptic  around  the  sun,  continuing  to  double  every  twenty 
years,  increasing  at  the  rate  of  five  per  cent,  per  annum, 
which  is  Mr.  Clay's  estimate,  and  will  amount  to  5  millions 
in  20  years ;  in  40  years  to  10  millions ;  60  years  to  20 
millions;  80  years  to  40  millions,  and  100  years  to  eighty 
millions — outnumbering  every  slave,  serf  and  boor  in  the 


198  ALVAN   6TEWAKT. 

civilized  or  savage  world.  Look  at  the  number  in  1 20  years — 
160  millions ;  in  140  years,  320  millions ;  in  160  years,  at  the 
same  rate,  620  millions — outnumbering  the  inhabitants  of 
China — yea,  of  Asia  and  Europe  united  ;  and,  in  the  opinion 
of  many,  equalling  in  number  the  present  inhabitants  of  this 
planet. 

Look  at  180  years,  you  see  1,240  millions  of  slaves  if  the 
whole  earth  could  feed  them,  and  if  each  slave  of  this  vast 
number  was  to  endure  only  an  average  amount  of  misery  and 
injustice  inflicted  on  the  slaves  of  this  generation,  surely  the 
everlasting  hell  itself  would  cry  out  that  its  horrors  were  out- 
done by  a  slave-ruined  world. 

This  is  the  institution  sought  to  be  pressed  upon  the  rising 
destiny  of  the  New  World,  and  for  so  urging  it  upon  our 
perpetual  acceptance,  and  fostering,  he  asks  the  office  of  Presi- 
dent. Let  us  examine  this  petition,  as  analyzed  by  the  pacifi- 
cator. 

It  is  signed  by  the  principal  men  in  the  city  of  Washington, 
the  mayor  and  several  hundred  citizens.  Many  of  those  per- 
sons conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery,  who  are  grieved  and 
astonished  out  of  measure  that  misguided  individuals  should 
press  on  the  consideration  of  Congress,  the  abolition  of 
slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  who  state,  that  when 
they  wish  it,  they,  of  the  District,  will  let  Congress  know. 
They  say  it  is  a  question  purely  municipal,  between  the  Dis- 
trict and  their  own  legislature,  Congress. 

The  slaveholder  can  embark  all  the  respectability  of  piracy 
in  his  favor.  The  mayor,  and  all  officials  stand  by  him. 
Secondly,  those  conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery.  How 
many  eternities  it  would  take  to  abolish  slavery,  did  it  de- 
pend on  these  conscientious  opposers,  who  have  petitioned 
for  its  continuance,  till  the  sun  shall  grow  dim  in  years,  till 
the  centre  of  gravity  yield  up  his  old  dominion ! 

These  conscientious  men,  love  liberty  so  intensely  that  they 


199 

petition  for  slavery  ;  their  souls  burn  for  that  high  behest  of 
all  men,  liberty,  and  to  gratify  that  darling  wish,  they  petition 
the  highest  legislative  tribunal  of  their  country  that  men  and 
women  may  become  things  ;  that  they  may  be  marked  like 
horses,  asses  and  oxen,  for  nothing,  by  their  owners,  and 
that  they  may  be  scourged,  their  bodies  cut  into  haggard 
scars  ;  that  husband  and  wife,  for  a  few  pieces  of  gold,  may 
be  parted  to  see  each  other  no  more,  and  if  either  endeavors  to 
run  away  and  see  the  other,  the  husband  the  wife,  the  wife  the 
husband,  the  child  the  parent,  or  the  parent  the  child,  that  the 
bloodhound  may  pursue  and  overtake  and  tear  their  flesh  from 
their  quivering  limbs,  and  if  the  slave-hunter  pursues,  and  the 
fugitive  flees,  most  deliberately  may  the  death-dealing  rifle 
be  raised  and  brought  to  a  level,  sure  aim  taken  by  a  fiendish 
squint,  the  report  is  heard,  and  a  wild  scream  of  death  is  the 
finale,  and  the  slave  becomes  a,  freeman  of  the  unseen  world. 
"  Where  is  my  father,  where  is  my  mother  ?"  inquire  their 
little  children,  as  the  slave-hunters  return  from  their  excursion 
of  blood  and  murder.  Can  they  answer  this  question  ?  If 
they  can,  truly  these  are  the  only  persons  who  can,  in 
the  three  kingdoms  of  Heaven,  Earth  and  Hell.  These 
men  "  conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery,"  and  yet  petition 
for  the  perpetuity  of  a  system,  which  makes  us  the  scorn  of 
man  !  This  is  the  conscientious  opposition  that  tigers  have 
for  kids,  wolves  for  lambs,  hyenas  for  blood.  Such  solemn 
duplicity  on  the  high  places  of  the  earth  ;  such  a  mixture  of 
pretensions  of  lofty  humanity,  stooping  to  the  perpetuity  of 
all  that  is  horrible  in  time  or  punishable  in  eternity.  The 
assurance  of  the  bold,  the  impudent  and  successful  impostors, 
which  has  been  able  with  the  horrid  accents  of  pretended 
devotion  to  liberty,  republican  law,  and  veneration  for  the 
sanctity  of  our  religion,  to  blot  out  all  distinction  between 
right  and  wrong,  upset  the  ten  commandments,  make  the 
Scriptures  a  cunningly  devised  fable,  humanity  a  by-word, 


200  ALVAJT   STEWABT. 

the  Declaration  of  Independence  an  absurdity,  the  Constitu- 
tion a  rope  of  sand,  the  laws  a  nose  of  wax,  the  English 
language  a  liar,  the  name  of  an  American  a  reproach.  The 
American  has  not  his  true  name  as  yet ;  but  the  world  are 
preparing  to  christen  him  and  give  him  a  cognomen,  which 
will  make  him  hang  his  head  with  shame,  and  at  best  he  will 
enjoy  but  a  contraband  and  furtive  reception  into  respectable 
circles  of  European  society. 

But  we  are  informed  that  the  reason  why  many  of  those 
who  are  "  conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery,"  signed  the 
petition  for  perpetual  slavery  in  the  District,  and  in  hostility 
to  its  abolition  is,  "  because  they  justly  respect  the  rights  of 
those  who  own  this  description  of  property;"  such  men  must 
be  very  conscientious  ;  why  not  respect  the  rights  of  the 
slaves  ?  Why  is  this  conscientiousness  all  for  the  master, 
who  has  purloined  the  earnings  of  the  slaves  through  several 
generations  for  200  years  ? 

Another  reason  why  these  conscientious  men  petition  is, 
that  those  who  have  petitioned  for  the  abolition  of  slavery 
in  the  District  of  Columbia  live  out  of  the  District,  and 
therefore  have  no  business  to  interfere  with  it !  Repeal  the 
slave  laws  enacted  by  the  Congressmen  of  Vermont,  New 
York,  New  Hampshire  and  Massachusetts  in  1800  and  1801. 
Abolitionists  simply  ask  Congress  to  repeal  its  own  laws 
which  it  has  made ;  and  was  it  ever  known  that  a  legislature 
might  not  repeal  its  own  laws  ?  Let  Vermont  and  Massa- 
chusetts stand  by  their  representatives,  where  they  did  before 
they  helped  to  enact  the  slave  laws  of  the  District,  and  no 
more  is  required.  Slavery  will  then  be  dead  in  the  District. 
Vermont  and  Massachusetts  by  their  members  of  Congress 
enacted  slavery  into  a  legal  system  in  the  District  of  Colum- 
bia. The  moment  the  jurisdiction  of  the  territory  was  ceded 
by  Virginia  and  Maryland  to  the  United  States  and  accepted 
by  the  Union  as  the  seat  of  government,  eo  instanti  in  point 


ANSWER  TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  201 

of  law,  the  slave  system  and  all  of  the  laws  of  those  two 
States  in  the  District  were  annihilated.  Now  from  this  point 
we  start ;  if  Congress  had  no  power  to  create  the  relation  of 
slave  and  master,  then,  for  near  forty  years,  the  colored  man 
has  been  deprived  of  his  liberty  by  unconstitutional  laws.  If  the 
law  was  constitutional,  the  States,  by  whose  means,  through 
their  representatives,  this  most  malignant  system  was  intro- 
duced, owe  it  to  the  slaves,  whether  the  slaveowners  were 
willing  or  unwilling  to  repeal  the  system  immediately  and 
make  all  the  atonement  in  their  power  to  helpless  innocence. 
One  cannot  but  be  astonished  at  the  slaveholding  eifrontery 
in  always  refusing  to  regard  the  slaves  as  any  part  or  parcel 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  Territory.  The  nation  is  responsi- 
ble for  the  system  of  slavery  in  that  District ;  therefore, 
"  those  conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery,"  who  petition  for 
its  everlasting  continuance  in  the  District  give  as  another 
reason  for  wishing  to  perpetuate  slavery  against  their  con- 
science, their  "  deep  conviction  that  a  continued  agitation  by 
those  who  have  no  right  to  interfere  with  it  has  an  injurious 
influence  on  the  community,  and  upon  the  well-being  and 
happiness  of  those  held  in  subjection."  Here  are  three  evils 
or  reasons  which  the  slaveholder,  "  conscientiously  opposed 
to  slavery,"  gives,  for  petitioning  for  the  endless  continuance 
of  slavery  in  the  District. 

1st.  N"o  right  to  interfere  by  those  who  organized  the 
system  and  put  the  yoke  on  the  neck  of  these  guiltless  poor. 
You  created  the  system,  but  have  no  business  to  uncreate. 
You  legislated  the  system  of  iniquity  into  existence ;  but  it 
would  be  interference  to  legislate  it  out. 

Second  reason  given  by  these  slaveholders  who  are  "  con- 
scientiously opposed  to  slavery,"  why  it  should  endure  for- 
ever in  the  District,  is,  that  the  agitation  of  the  question  of 
abolition  "  has  an  injurious  influence  on  the  community." 

If  it  has  an  injurious  efiect  now,  when  there  are  say,  "  but 
9* 


202  ALVAN    STEWART. 

7,000  slaves  in  that  community,  it  would  be  twice  as  injuri- 
ous, arithmetically  speaking,  twenty  years  hence,  when  the 
slaves  shall  be  14,000  in  number,  and  the  whites  proportion- 
ally increased.  It  therefore  follows  that  the  injury  to  the 
community  is  at  the  minimum,  or  ounce  notch  at  the  bar,  and 
any  delay  to  abolish  slavery  will  only  increase  this  difficulty 
with  increasing  number,  so  the  weight  would  be  forever  slid- 
ing back  into  ihepound  notches,  and  so  on  to  the  end  of  the 
bar,  the  longer  emancipation  is  delayed.  For  it  is  often 
said  that  the  reason  slavery  was  abolished  in  the  northern 
States,  was  because  of  the  paucity  of  the  slaves.  The  more 
slaves  there  are,  the  greater  is  the  number  of  whites  and 
blacks  who  must  have  their  social  relations  broken  up  and 
changed.  The  difficulty  of  emancipation  increases  in  the 
ratio  of  numbers,  whether  emancipation  takes  place  with  or 
without  compensation.  If  without  compensation,  then  the 
loss  will  be  less  to  individuals,  the  smaller  the  number  of 
slaves ;  if  compensation  is  adopted,  the  difficulty  increases 
with  every  hour  of  delay ;  for  if  the  laborious  part  of  the 
community  are  to  maintain  themselves  and  to  pay  a  sum, 
which,  put  at  interest,  will  maintain  the  masters,  as  well  as 
they  now  are,  the  fewer  of  those  masters,  and  the  fewer  slaves 
owned  by  those  masters,  the  less  the  sum  will  be  to  pay. 
Whether  expulsion,  colonization,  separation  or  manumission  on 
the  soil,  there  is  one  proposition  on  which  the  ultra-slaveholder 
and  Abolitionist  and  men  of  all  intermediate  shades  of  opinion 
must  concur,  to  wit,  if  slavery  is  not  to  be  eternal,  then  the 
best  for  the  slaveholder,  the  slave  and  the  remainder  of  the 
community,  is,  that  abolition  should  take  place  before  the 
number  of  slaves  shall  have  increased. 

The  third  reason  urged  by  the  slaveholder  "  conscientiously 
opposed  to  slavery"  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  is  that  the 
agitation  of  the  question  of  slavery  by  the  petitions  of  the 
freemen  of  New  England,  Ohio,  and  New  York,  in  praying 


ANSWER  TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  203 

for  its  abolition,  "  will  have  an  injurious  effect  upon  the 
well  being  and  happiness  of  those  held  in  subjection "  by 
slavery. 

The  master,  conscientiously  opposed  to  slavery,  thus  testi- 
fies his  ardent  love  for  liberty : 

Do  the  masters  fear  that,  in  consequence  of  the  agitation 
of  this  question  by  the  constitutional  mode  of  petition,  they 
shall  be  obliged  to  add  to  the  severity  of  stripes,  hunger, 
nakedness,  or  deprive  the  man  of  his  wife  oftener ;  separate 
the  mother  from  the  children  for  a  longer  time ;  for  they 
must  refer  to  corporeal  ills  of  this  description  ;  because,  in 
relation  to  the  immortal  mind,  slavery  has  done  its  worst,  no 
greater  injury  can  be  done  to  the  well  being  of  the  undying 
mind,  denied  all  access  to  books,  all  knowledge  of  divine  or 
moral  truths,  penalties  on  penalties  for  teaching  the  child  who 
is  a  slave  to  read.  These  things  have  no  parallel  in  the  annals  of 
brutality  ;  for  the  first,  offence,  teacher  and  taught  are  to  be 
whipped  thirty-nine  lashes  on  the  naked  back,  if  both  are 
slaves ;  for  the  second  offence,  one  hundred  lashes ;  and  for 
the  third,  death.  - ; ,  v- . 

Slaves,  do  you  complain  that  your  "  happiness  and  well- 
being,"  are  injured  by  petitions  presented  for  your  redemp- 
tion ?  "  No,  we  have  no  happiness  and  well-being  to  be 
injured — and  were  every  petition  presented  in  our  behalf  a 
blow  laid  on  with  violence,  we  would  pray  their  numbers  to 
be  increased — yes,  we  beseech  you,  our  friends,  by  the  rich 
boon  of  liberty,  for  which  we  pant  and  pray,  never  to  faint  or 
grow  weary  in  well-doing  ;  to  you  our  eyes  are  turned,  living 
and  dying ;  for  our  sake,  for  our  children's  sake,  for  unborn 
generations'  sake,  do  not  cease,  day  and  night,  to  bombard 
this  dreadful  bastile.  We  are  more  than  prisoners,  we  are 
slaves— we  are  at  the  bottom  of  the  wheel  and  can  find  no 
lower  depth."  - 

Or,  does  the  District  petition  presented  by.  the  senator,  mean, 


204  ALVAN   STEWART. 

that  the  master  vents  his  spleen,  which  boils  up  from  the  bot- 
tom of  his  atra-bilious  soul,  on  the  poor  slave,  because  he  hates 
the  petitioning  Abolitionist,  whom  he  supposes  is  in  sympathy 
with  the  miserable  and  undone  slave. 

Mr.  Clay  says  that  he  has  differed  in  opinion  with  the 
course  of  the  House  of  Representatives  in  relation  to  the 
reception  of  Abolition  petitions.  While  the  House  refuse  to 
read,  print,  refer,  consider  and  report  thereon,  he,  Mr.  Clay, 
would  do  all  always  by  sound  argument,  coming  a  little 
more  circuitously  to  the  prompt  conclusion  of  the  House — the 
entire  and  absolute  rejection  of  the  petition ;  but  this  was  to 
be  done  by  an  argumentative  appeal  to  the  good  sense  of  the 
community.  This  is  Mr.  Clay's  medicine  for  the  plague  of 
slavery.  Let  us  see  for  a  moment  how  this  thing  might  be 
made  to  appear  if  the  course  pointed  out  by  the  trans-montane 
orator  had  been  adopted.  It  is  said  that  fighting  is  a  busi- 
ness that  two  men  can  play  at.  The  amount  of  Mr.  Clay's 
proposition  is  that  an  argumentative  appeal  made  to  the  good 
sense  of  the  people  of  the  United  States  would  entirely  satisfy 
them  that  slavery  was  a  good  institution,  as  though  the  rea- 
son, that  some  are  dissatisfied  with  that  system  at  present  is 
their  ignorance  of  its  excellence,  and  it  only  requires  to  be 
explained  to  be  admired,  only  portrayed  to  be  embraced,  to 
be  dressed  in  its  true  colors,  and  philanthropy  will  run  to  salute 
it,  humanity  will  pillow  it  on  its  bosom,  while  justice  will 
rock  it  to  quietness,  when  querulous  republicanism  herself — 
fair  daughter  of  the  Revolution — will  hold  it  up  to  an  admir- 
ing world,  as  her  darling,  her  first  born,  the  armament  of  the 
nation  in  time  of  peace,  her  glory  and  sure  defence  in  time  of 
war.  In  this  successful  argument  addressed  to  the  American 
people,  Christianity  herself  must  be  called  to  the  stand  as  a 
witness,  while  she  says  "  God  made  of  one  blood  all  nations." 
"Do  unto  others  as  ye  would  they  should  do  unto  you," 
"  Love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself,"  "  Break  every  yoke,  let  the 


ANSWER  TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  205 

oppressed  go  free,''  "  He  who  stealeth  a  man  let  him  be  put 
to  death  ;"  and  in  Babylon  was  found,  "  cinnamon,  and  odors, 
and  ointment,  and  frankincense,  and  wine,  and  oil,  and  fine 
flour,  and  wheat,  and  beasts,  and  sheep,  and  horses,  and  cha- 
riots, and  slaves,  and  souls  of  men."  She  further  says,  that, 
in  the  synod  of  Georgia  and  South  Carolina,  as  my  ministers 
of  the  Presbyterian  Synod  certify,  there  are  100,000  persons 
who  never  heard  of  Jesus  Christ.  To  be  sure,  it  is  by  south- 
ern law,  a  crime,  to  be  punished  with  stripes,  for  slaves  to 
be  found  reading  the  Saviour's  sermon  on  the  mount,  or  for 
one  to  be  found  teaching  another  to  read  the  Lord's  prayer 
or  ten  commandments,  punishable,  for  the  third  offence,  in 
some  of  the  States,  with  death ;  to  be  sure,  God  says  of  the 
marriage  relation,  "  what  God  hath  joined  together  let  no  man 
put  asunder ;''  and  children  are  commanded  to  obey  their 
parents ;  slaveholders  sell  wives  from  their  husbands,  and 
make  children  obey  masters  and  not  parents.  To  be  sure 
slaveholders  murder  their  slaves,  when  they  attempt  to  run 
away  and  they  cannot  stop  them  without ;  to  be  sure,  they, 
the  masters,  bid  up  bounties  to  be  given  those  who  will  shoot 
dead  outlawed  slaves,  who  are  hiding  themselves  in  the  wil- 
derness from  the  terrors  of  their  masters,  half  starved  ;  to  be 
sure,  there  is  not  one  schoolhouse  nor  three  churches  in  all 
the  South  for  the  three  millions  of  slaves ;  to  be  sure,  no  man 
is  permitted  to  preach  to  slaves  without  making  the  obedi- 
ence of  slaves  to  masters  as  a  stepping-stone  to  immortal  life, 
disobedience,  eternal  death ;  the  Alpha  and  Omega  of  a 
slave's  theology  is  to  obey  their  masters  in  all  things,  right 
or  wrong. 

To  be  sure,  labor  is  despised  at  the  South  and  considered 
degrading  and  ignoble,  except  in  the  slave.  To  be  sure,  there 
are  more  duels  and  assassinations  among  the  aristocratic 
whites  than  there  are  days  in  the  year,  which  are  the  gentle- 
manly employments  of  southern  citizens,  and  are  the  standing 


206  ALVAN   STEWART. 

schools  kept  to  teach  men  politeness  and  educate  men  to  a 
lofty  bearing.  To  be  sure,  there  are  500,000  slaves  whose 
masters  are  their  fathers,  and  brothers,  and  sisters,  being 
one-half,  three-fourths,  six-sevenths  and  nine-tenths  white  ; 
and  in  all  cases  of  this  sort,  slavery  wears  its  most  attractive 
and  winning  form — for  if  a  father,  or  brother,  or  sister,  has 
not  a  right  to  whip,  beat,  shoot,  murder  and  sell  his  own 
child,  his  own  brother,  his  own  sister,  there  is  no  object  in 
having  children,  brothers  or  sisters  ;  this  is  one  of  the  most 
interesting  inventions  made  in  this  age  of  fruitful  discovery. 
The  father  is,  in  the  language  of  Horace,  "  faber  ejus  for- 
tunae."  If  the  father,  at  the  North,  of  ten  children,  could 
sell  them  as  they  grew  up  for  $1000  each,  it  is  easily  per- 
ceived he  might  wallow  in  wealth,  instead  of  dragging  life 
out  in  "  chill  penury."  Again,  it  is  eminently  calculated  to 
make  men  obey  one  of  the  oldest  commands,  to  wit,  multiply 
and  replenish  the  earth.  Christianity  herself  feels  bound  to 
testify  in  behalf  of  slavery,  that  this  command  is  obeyed  with 
a  singular  faithfulness  and  devotion.  The  money  for  which 
a  parent  may  sell  his  son  or  daughter,  especially  where  the 
African  tinge  has  disappeared,  and  a  larger  proportion  of  the 
father  comes  out  in  the  progeny,  will  amount  sometimes  to 
$2,000  or  $3,000,  and  furnish  money  for  a  summer  excursion 
for  the  father  at  the  North,  and  will  allow  him  to  pass  several 
times  up  and  down  the  North  River,  and  make  him  gape  with 
admiration  at  the  everlasting  Palisadoes,  and  inquire  the 
altitude  of  the  lofty  peaks  of  our  cloud-propping  Appalachians, 
and  then  inquire  into  an  analysis  of  Saratoga  waters,  and 
promenade  the  porticos  of  the  eating  and  sleeping  palaces  of 
the  land,  walk  abroad  and  listen  to  the  sound  of  the  sea  as 
it  seems  to  murmur  in  the  tops  of  the  lofty  pines,  then  a  tour 
through  Lake  George,  Ticonderoga,  Crown  Point,  Lake 
Champlain,  St.  Johns,  Montreal  and  Quebec — the  military 
classic  region— and  then  return  by  the  Niagara  Falls,  and  so 


ANSWER  TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  207 

down  to  New  York,  in  time  to  attend  the  Board  of  Commis- 
sioners of  Foreign  Missions,  and  to  display  his  generosity  in 
giving  $50  of  the  remnant  of  the  purchase  money  of  his 
daughter,  to  carry  the  Gospel  to  the  benighted  Georgians 
beyond  the  Black  Sea,  who  are  so  barbarous  and  so  unen- 
lightened, as  to  sell  their  beautiful  daughters  to  be  immured 
in  the  seraglios  of  the  nobles  of  Constantinople,  or  the  harem 
of  the  Grand  Seignior.  Illustrious  benefactor  of  Christianity  ! 
Let  no  man  say  it  is  the  duty  of  the  Board  of  Missions  ever 
to  inquire  whether  the  money  given  them  was  acquired  by 
the  cunning  of  the  gambler,  or  the  arts  of  the  courtesan  ;  by 
the  success  of  the  highwayman,  or  by  the  slaveholder  selling 
his  daughter  into  slavery. 

What  can  be  more  admired  in  this  age  of  the  19th  century 
than  to  see  a  brother  sailing  over  the  ocean  and  dashing 
through  all  the  fashionable  rounds  of  dissipation  in  London, 
Paris,  St.  Petersburg,  Vienna  and  Rome,  maintained  the 
whole  tour  by  the  avails  of  a  poor  broken-hearted  sister,  who 
was  sold  before  commencing  the  grand  expedition,  for  $5,000, 
to  a  gentleman  in  New  Orleans  ? 

But  the  young  traveller  wanted  money ;  she  was  the  most 
valuable  piece  of  stock  he  owned.  He,  however,  gave  £20 
at  the  anniversary  in  London,  after  hearing  an  eloquent 
speech,  to  aid  the  Magdalen's  Society. 

A  sister  sells  a  brother  to  carry  the  hod  for  the  bricklayer 
to  the  fourth  story  of  the  house,  and  languish  and  die  under 
the  visitation  of  the  lash,  to  supply  her  with  laces,  wedding 
rings  and  ornamental  dresses  for  the  bridal  day,  when  she 
shall  wed  a  man  who  has  sold  his  sister  for  money  to  buy  a 
chariot  and  four,  in  which  the  bride  and  bridegroom  may  roll 
their  honeymoon  away,  in  going  from  watering-place  to 
watering-spring,  or  in  search  of  mountain  air,  or  sea  beach 
side  by  moonlight,  where  they  may  listen  to  the  ocean's 


208  ALVAN   STEWART. 

everlasting  song,  and  see  the  moonbeams  dance  upon  the 
waves,  and  enjoy  the  delicious  reverie  in  nature's  witchery, 
and  read  the  last  novel,  as  they  course  along  day  by  day,  and 
enjoy  the  reviving  power  of  ether  and  musk  when  her  sympa- 
thies overcome  the  bride  in  listening  to  the  well-depicted 
woes  of  romance  and  suffering  of  bygone  days  of  chivalry. 
Look  at  the  interesting  pair  ;  you  may  overhear  them  speak- 
ing, with  most  sovereign  contempt,  of  those  miserable  northern 
families  who  are  interfering  with  our  peculiar  institutions. 
Says  the  bridegroom  to  the  bride,  "  Those  fanatical  monsters 
at  the  North  would  fain  have  prevented  me  in  selling  my 
sister  for  this  chariot  and  four,  so  weE  caparisoned,  in  which 
we  ride."  "  Yes,"  says  the  bride,  "  these  same  meddling 
monster  fanatics  would,  if  they  could  have  had  their  wish, 
have  prevented  me  from  selling  my  brother  into  slavery,  by 
the  avails  of  whose  sale  I  am  made  so  charmingly  interesting 
to  you,  my  spouse,  and  am  now  flashing  in  diamond  rings, 
necklace  and  splendid  tiara !  Monsters !  I  believe  they  will 
dissolve  our  Union,  if  they  do  not  cease  this  officious  inter- 
meddling !  What  an  advantage  we  have,  my  dear,"  said  the 
thoughtful  bride,  "  in  having  our  lives  cast  in  pleasant  places ; 
for  if  we  had  been  born  at  the  North,  you  and  I  would  have 
been  poor,  and  could  not  sell  our  brothers  and  sisters.  Only 
see,"  continued  she,  "  the  good  sense  of  our  ancestors  and 
their  legislators,  whereby  the  whole  of  the  family  is  not 
obliged  to  be  poor,  but  certain  brothers  and  sisters  are 
authorized  to  sell  the  rest  of  their  sisters  and  brethren  into 
slavery,  and  become  opulent  and  grand ;  whereas,  at  the 
North  all  are  free  and  all  are  poor !  With  our  institution  of 
slavery,  and  the  power  of  one  branch  of  the  family  to  sell  the 
rest,  no  family  is  in  danger  of  losing  its  caste  and  elevated 
position  in  society,  and  it  enables  us  to  do  something  for 
benevolent  objects,  in  carrying  religion  to  the  benighted 


209 

pagans  of  the  old  world,  who  have  not  enjoyed  the  high 
privileges  we  possess,  in  this  land,  where '  all  men  are  created 
free  and  equal.' " 

Suppose  the  above  dispassionate  appeal  should  be  sent 
forth  to  the  nation,  by  the  committee  to  be  appointed  on 
slavery,  according  to  Mr.  Clay's  project,  revealing  some  of 
the  choice  beauties  connected  with  the  institution  of  slavery ; 
is  it  not  believed  that  the  mighty  spirit  that  rides  and  directs 
this  moral  storm,  would  forever  abandon  the  pursuit  of 
liberty  for  the  American  slave  ? 

But  suppose  a  committee  appointed,  as  Mr.  Clay  suggests, 
clothed  with  a  general  power  to  pry  into  ah1  the  secrets  of 
this  dreadful  prison-house,  and  armed  with  the  usual  right  of 
committees  of  this  character,  to  send  for  persons  and  papers. 

Suppose  this  committee  had  made  up  their  mind  to  glean 
facts  from  the  following  and  distinct  sources ;  what  would 
the  facts  warrant  as  their  general  conclusion? 

1  st.  Let  the  committee  send  for  the  statutes  of  the  thirteen 
slave  States,  and  have  extracts  made  from  the  legislation  of 
each  State,  showing  the  servile  law,  or  law  of  slavery. 

The  1st  point.  All  the  statutes  would  show  a  slave  to  be  a 
thing,  a  mere  chattel,  and  that  he  ranks  with  horses  and  hogs, 
and  he  and  his  increase  is  his  master's.  2d.  That  he  or  she 
never  can  be  a  witness  against  a  white  man  for  the  greatest 
wrong  done  him  or  her.  3d.  The  greatest  violence  done  to 
their  bodies  or  limbs  is  a  matter  for  which  they  can  seek  no 
redress.  The  master  has  all  that  is  got.  4th.  The  courts  of 
civil  and  criminal  justice  are  never  opened  to  them  as  against 
a  white  man,  any  more  than  courts  are  open  for  goats  and 
hogs  to  come  and  prosecute.  5th.  For  the  reason  they 
themselves  have  no  rights  for  which  to  prosecute.  6th.  A 
slave  may  be  separated  from  his  wife — his  children  may  be 
taken  from  their  parents.  7th.  It  is  a  great  crime  by  the  law 
for  a  slave  to  teach  or  be  taught.  8th.  In  most  of  the  States, 


210  ALVAN  STEWABT. 

slaves  cannot  meet  for  worship  unless  more  whites  are  present 
than  slaves.  9th.  A  peck  of  corn,  costing  12£  cents,  is  the 
amount  of  sustenance  the  law  requires  the  master  to  give  the 
slave  per  week.  No  man  could  board  a  dog  at  the  North  for  a 
less  sum,  per  week.  .10th.  In  some  States,  twenty,  some  forty, 
and  others  seventy-eight,  crimes  are  punishable  with  death 
in  the  slave,  llth.  It  is  death  in  many  States  for  a  slave  to 
raise  his  or  her  hand  against  a  white  person,  no  matter  how 
great  the  provocation  or  necessity.  12th.  The  slave,  in  cases 
that  take  his  life,  or  capital  cases,  has  no  trial  by  jury.  13th. 
The  master  has  unUmited  power  to  flog  and  beat.  14th.  The 
master  has  power  to  kill  on  the  slave's  raising  his  hand. 
15th.  The  master  has  power  to  shoot  dead  the  slave  running 
away,  and  he  is  guiltless. 

2nd.  Inquiry.  Let  the  committee  subposna  the  clerk  of 
every  county  in  the  slave  States,  ordering  them  to  bring  their 
dockets  and  records,  to  see  whether  there  was  ever  a  white 
man  convicted  and  executed  for  the  murder  of  a  colored  man 
or  slave.  It  is  averred  there  was  never  one.  It  is  averred 
there  never  was  half  a  dozen  convictions  of  murder  in  the 
thirteen  States,  since  the  Revolution,  for  the  murder  of  slaves. 
Though  it  is  averred  there  have  been  more  than  100,000  mur- 
ders, which  would  have  been  called  murders,  had  the  victims 
been  white  men  instead  of  slaves — by  overworking,  under- 
feeding, want  of  clothing,  cruelty,  violence,  and  by  deliberate 
murder. 

3rd.  Let  the  committee  send  for  100  slaveholders  from 
the  different  States,  and  examine  as  to  their  feeding,  clothing, 
holidays ;  the  hovel  of  the  slave,  the  modes  of  punishing,  the 
number  who  die  annually,  the  average  whippings  of  males 
and  females ;  the  difference  between  plantation  hands  and 
house  hands ;  the  general  power  conferred  on  overseers ;  the 
number  of  fugitives,  the  number  of  bloodhounds  kept,  tho 
number  of  slaves  mangled  and  killed  by  them,  the  number 


TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  211 

killed  for  running  away,  lifting  their  hands  against  the  whites, 
executed  according  to  law,  and  for  what  offences,  and  before 
what  tribunal  tried ;  the  number  outlawed  hi  the  county  courts 
for  running  away. 

4th.  Examine  at  least  one  hundred  overseers  and  their 
books  as  to  the  number  of  men  and  women  on  cotton, 
rice,  sugar  and  tobacco  plantations ;  on  all  the  ques- 
tions put  the  master;  his  mode  of  punishing;  the  hours 
of  labor  and  rest;  the  beds  and  clothing;  the  crop  raised, 
the  deaths — the  usual  increase;  the  distance  of  planta- 
tions on  which  man  and  wife  live,  owned  by  different 
masters ;  the  clothing,  the  difference  in  clothing  between 
field  hands,  and  those  who  are  tavern  or  body,  or  house 
slaves.  When  do  children  begin  to  work,  and  how  soon 
does  the  female  after  accouchement,  take  the  hoe  in  the  field  ? 
What  is  overseer's  wages — what  number  of  persons  who  are 
slaves  have  white  blood  ?  How  many  have  been  sold  in  the 
last  three  years  ?  How  many  families  been  separated,  wife 
from  husband,  and  children  from  parents  ? 

5th.  Examine  twenty  negro  merchants,  who  live  by  buying 
and  selling  human  flesh. 

1st.  How  many  families  have  you  broken  up  in  the  year 
past — separated  portions  ?  Do  you  bind  them  in  couples,  do 
you  not  whip  those  who  weep  and  mourn  for  their  wives  or  hus- 
bands, or  children  left  behind,  until  they  dry  their  tears  under 
the  lash?  Do  you  imprison,  and  where?  Do  you  buy 
children  by  the  pound  ?  Do  you  make  them  drag  an  iron 
ball  and  chain  ?  How  are  those  females  treated  who  become 
mothers  on  your  journeys  ? 

6th.  Let  one  hundred  persons  living  in  slave  States  for 
twenty  years  past,  in  the  different  States  not  related  to  slave- 
holders, come  forward  and  testify.  As  to  the  inferior  class 
of  slaveholders  owning  two,  three,  five,  or  ten  slaves,  who 
hire  the  men  out  by  the  month,  day,  or  year ;  women  by  tho 


212  ALVAN   STEWART. 

day,  at  washing  or  other  handiwork.  Do  these  small  slave- 
owners work  ?  And  generally  put  all  the  questions  before 
put.  "What  is  the  effect  of  slavery  on  the  whites,  as  to  duel- 
ling, bloody  rencounters,  and  murders  ?  Does  it  not  destroy 
the  character  and  standing  of  poor  white  men?  Does  it  not 
degrade  the  white  labor  ?  Is  not  labor  esteemed  dishonor- 
able in  a  white  man  or  woman  ?  Are  there  not  one  quarter 
of  the  white  adults  who  cannot  read  and  write  in  the  slave 
States  ?  Is  not  agriculture  in  a  wretched  condition  in  the 
slave  States  ?  Are  there  not  large  districts  of  country,  once 
esteemed  fertile,  which  are  now  abandoned  and  worn  out  ? 
Is  not  slave  culture  eminently  calculated  to  render  the  land 
sterile  ?  Would  there  not  be  double  the  amount  of  labor 
performed  under  the  stimulus  of  cash,  than  what  is  done 
under  the  lash?  Is  there  not  a  promiscuous  concubinage 
between  the  white  males  and  the  slave  females  ?  Is  not  the 
Saxon  blood  increasing  every  year  among  the  slaves  ?  How 
many  persons  do  you  know  held  as  slaves,  men  and  women, 
who  are  as  white  as  people  generally  are  who  give  no  evi- 
dence of  African  blood  ?  Is  not  the  institution  of  slavery 
mutually  debasing  to  the  master  and  slaves  ?  Have  you  not 
known  many  persons  or  masters  killed  by  their  slaves  ?  But 
did  you  ever  know  or  hear  of  a  slave  killing  his  master,  mis- 
tress, or  any  of  the  family,  after  they  were  set  at  liberty  f 

Let  the  questions  be  put  to  each  of  the  witnesses  as  to  the 
general  practice  of  masters  and  mistresses  on  large  planta- 
tions sleeping  with  pistols  and  swords  under  their  heads. 
Is  burning  a  punishment  common  for  a  slave  who  is  to  be  put 
to  death  ? 

7th.  Let  100  free  colored  men  be  called  before  the  committee 
from  the  slave  States,  and  examined  on  many  of  the  foregoing 
points,  and  let  them  be  asked :  1st.  Have  you  not  known  every 
year  free  colored  people  kidnapped,  reduced  to  slavery  by  hav- 
ing their  free  papers  torn  up,  and  carried  off  a  distance  and  sold 


ANSWEK  TO  CLAY'S  SPEECH.  213 

— if  yea,  who  were  they  ?  2d.  Are  you  not  in  perpetual  fear 
of  being  kidnapped  ?  Have  you  not  been  struck  by  white  per- 
sons, and  abused  frequently,  without  redress  ?  Are  not  free 
colored  females  subject  to  most  flagrant  insults  from  white 
men  ?  Do  not  the  laws  allow  the  mayor  of  a  city,  or  sheriff 
of  a  county  to  banish  you  from  the  State  in  fifteen  days  by 
proclamation,  and  if  you  return  or  do  not  go,  to  sell  you 
into  perpetual  slavery  and  confiscate  your  property,  real  and 
personal?  Are  you  allowed  to  send  your  children  to  any 
school  ?  Are  you  not  under  the  same  penalties  as  to  teach- 
ing and  being  taught,  that  the  slaves  are  ?  How  many  of 
your  relations  are  in  slavery  ?  How  many  fugitives,  whom 
you  knew  who  have  attempted  to  escape,  succeeded  ? — how 
many  were  taken  back  ? — how  many  died  in  the  woods  and 
swamps  ? — how  many  were  torn  to  pieces  by  bloodhounds  ? — 
how  many  were  wounded  ? — how  many  outlawed  and  shot 
dead  in  the  woods  ?  Are  many  of  the  free  colored  people  of 
the  South  who  are  adults,  married  to  slaves  ? 

8th.  Let  100  fugitive  slaves  who  have  escaped  to  the 
northern  States  or  to  Canada,  be  sworn  to  all  the  sad  vicis- 
situdes attending  their  escape  from  Georgia,  Alabama,  Mis- 
sissippi. Let  them  state  the  two,  three,  four,  and  five  months 
in  which  they  travelled  the  length  of  the  nation  in  the  night, 
not  in  the  roads  but  through  woods,  swimming  rivers,  with 
nothing  but  the  north  star  to  direct  them,  the  hunger,  rags, 
hairbreadth  escapes,  regarding  the  vast  South  as  one  jail 
yard,  and  every  white  man,  ferryman  and  gate-tender  as 
authorized  to  arrest  the  fugitive.  The  annals  of  the  world 
do  not  furnish  such  noble  daring  for  liberty  as  hundreds  of 
cases  now  in  Canada  might  attest.  What  were  the  special 
wrongs  which  induced  you  to  run  through  1,500  miles  of 
dangers  ?  Was  'there  ever  a  day  since  your  remembrance, 
in  which  the  desire  to  be  free  has  not  been  prominent  in  your 
mind? 


214  ALVAN   STEWART. 

9th.  Call  100  slaves  from  every  State  and  every  descrip- 
tion of  business ;  let  them  be  asked :  "  What  do  you  most 
desire  ?  Show  your  backs  ;  how  many  times  have  you  been 
flogged,  and  for  what?  Have  not  your  wife  and  your 
children  been  whipped  at  different  times,  by  the  overseer's 
orders,  before  your  face  ?  How  long  does  it  take  a  back  to 
become  sound  and  heal  up  from  the  time  of  a  cruel  flogging  ? 
Is  not  stealing  often  necessary  to  support  life  with  comfort  ? 
Have  you  not  been  ordered  out  of  your  bed,  that  a  white 
man  might  occupy  your  place  ?  In  addition  to  these,  put  a 
great  variety  of  questions  which  will  readily  suggest  them- 
selves to  an  inquiring  mind. 

Let  the  committee  make  a  digest  of  the  evidence  which 
these  nine  sources  of  information  of  slavery  would  furnish, 
and  it  would  be  a  book  of  600  pages,  and  if  after  giving  the 
evidence  impartially  to  the  nation,  the  committee  would  dare 
to  report  in  favor  of  the  institution  of  slavery,  we  might  call 
this  a  doomed  land,  whose  judgment  and  destruction  linger 
not.  No,  the  committee  might  as  well  call  all  the  men  of 
clear  vision  in  North  America  to  swear  that  the  sun  had 
shone  on  this  land  since  the  19th  century  began,  and  after 
hearing  this  evidence  should  then  report  that  there  had  been 
uninterrupted  darkness,  without  sun,  moon,  or  stars  since  the 
31st  day  of  December,  1799,  as  to  report,  under  the  weight 
of  the  evidence  which  must  be  drawn  forth  from  the  course 
above  suggested,  that  slavery  was  an  institution  which  ought 
to  be  continued  another  hour  in  this  land.  They  must  re- 
port against  it,  or  the  stones  in  the  street  would  cry  out. 
For,  the  slaveholders,  and  slavery  and  its  apologists,  would, 
one  and  all,  be  crushed  by  the  mountain  of  evidence,  and 
buried  in  one  common  grave,  so  deep  that  the  imagination 
would  reel  in  descending  that  awful  and  unexplored 
depth. 

It  is  thought  remarkable  that  the  Abolitionists  should  have 


215 

seized  hold  of  the  right  of  petition — a  right  broken  down, 
invaded  and  utterly  denied.  Denied  by  a  formality  of  Con- 
gressional proceeding  on  the  21st  December,  1837,  which,  for 
solemnity,  has  no  parallel  in  the  life  of  the  confederacy.  For 
what  oifence  was  this  oldest  right  of  man,  this  darling  attri- 
bute of  humanity,  the  right  of  petition,  condemned  and 
brought  to  the  block  ?  "Was  it  because  she  raised  her  voice 
against  a  republican  form  of  government?  Had  she  denied  that 
the  people  were  the  source  of  power,  or  did  she  wish  the 
nation  to  reswear  its  allegiance  to  England,  and  put  on  its 
colonial  sackcloth,  or  to  cover  the  name  of  "Washington  with 
ignominy,  or  that  Texas  might  be  received  into  the  arms  of  the 
Republic,  or  that  the  laboring  men  of  the  North  might  be 
made  slaves  ?  No  I  No  such  things.  She  simply  desired, 
through  the  media  of  well-written  memorials,  that  Congress 
would  be  pleased  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of  Colum- 
bia ;  or,  in  other  words,  repeal  certain  laws  which  Congress 
itself  had  enacted  in  1799  or  1800,  establishing  slavery  in 
the  District  of  Columbia.  She  asked  that  liberty  might  be 
given  to  7,000  most  wretched  slaves,  who  were  flitting  and 
sneaking  around  this  ten  miles  square — this  drawing-room  of 
the  nation — a  spectacle  of  disgrace  to  our  every  pretension 
as  a  republic — 7,000  slaves  to  be  seen  by  the  representatives 
of  the  nations  of  the  earth,  each  slave,  a  standing,  moving, 
crawling  witness,  of  the  base  hypocrisy  of  our  national 
diploma.  Each  slave  should  make  us  hang  our  heads  with 
shame ;  each  slave  here  makes  the  representative  of  des- 
potism tread  with  a  firmer  step  ;  each  king  of  the  earth  finda 
his  throne  more  firm  when  he  sees  republicanism  lean  on 
slavery.  Each  slave  proclaims  that  republicanism  is  a  traf- 
ficker in  flesh  and  blood  ;  each  slave  shows  we  are  cruel, 
proves  us  base,  selfish,  that  we  pursue  robbery  as  a  trade, 
piracy  as  a  livelihood.  Each  slave  proves  we  are  unfit  for 
freedom.  To  avenge  his  wrongs,  the  judgments  of  God  fol- 


216  ALVAN   STEWART. 

low  hard  upon  the  footsteps  of  the  slaveholder.  The  slave 
tells  you  that  where  he  lives  the  white  man  is  ferocious  ;  the 
common  rules  of  slaveholding  propriety  are  vindicated  by 
the  bowie  knife,  sustained  by  the  pistol,  and  asserted  by  the 
rifle.  Assassination  is  the  arraignment,  trial  and  execution, 
among  slaveholders. 

They  enslave  their  own  children,  sell  them  for  provisions, 
eat  them  up  by  circuity;  they  are  anthropophagi,  second- 
handed.  So  do  the  crocodiles  of  the  same  region  eat  their 
young,  until  they  are  strong  enough  to  escape.  The  whole 
ten  miles  square  echoes  with  screams  and  flagellation  ;  a  man 
beating  a  woman  to  extort,  unpaid,  from  the  quivering  flesh, 
labor  in  some  field,  or  over  some  wash-tub,  enough  for  his 
support ;  in  another  direction  a  woman,  with  jewels  in  her 
ears,  is  beating  a  man  to  extort  labor,  unrewarded,  to  main- 
tain Madam  in  idleness.  In  another  quarter,  the  coffled  gang 
of  slaves  are  marching  to  enter  the  bastile  erected  on  this  ten 
mile  square.  Their  groans  ascend  night  and  day  amidst  the 
cracking  of  whips,  and  the  cursing  of  land  pirates — these 
body  and  soul  dealers.  There  is  mourning,  the  wife  torn 
from  her  husband  and  children  to  see  them  no  more.  There 
the  loving  child  whose  garment  is  fastened  to  the  body  in 
bloody  stripes,  mangled  for  mourning  the  bereavement  of  her 
parents.  Is  this  a  sight  for  the  foreigner  to  behold  ?  Oh,  my 
country  !  how  degraded  !  Oh  !  my  God  !  when  shall  these 
scenes  come  to  an  end  ?  Shall  we  become  a  proverb  ?  Shall 
the  minions  of  power  in  the  Old  World  sneer  at  our  kidnap- 
ping morality  ?  Shall  our  native  Indian  forever  despise 
civilization,  built  on  such  criminal  injustice  ?  Well  may  he 
prefer  the  wigwam  of  the  wilderness  to  palaces,  built  by 
money  coined  from  the  slaves'  tears  and  blood.  Well  may 
he  prefer  the  Great  Spirit  to  the  Christian's  God,  if  the 
southern  professor  has  not  defamed  the  Divinity  he  professes 
to  adore. 


217 

The  orator  divides  Abolitionists  into  three  divisions  :  1st. 
The  harmless  Quaker  who  is  opposed  to  slavery,  but  is  also 
more  opposed  to  any  noise  and  disturbance  in  effecting  it. 
There  are,  truly,  some  sucli  frosty  Quakers,  but  this  is  not 
their  general  character.  There  is  a  large  body  of  this  respec- 
table denomination,  who  would  not  be  so  alarmed  at  the  out- 
cry of  ferocious  slaveholders,  fpaming  with  fury  and  threaten- 
ing, in  powerless  impotency,  as  to  be  deterred  from  an 
energetic  and  unconquerable  pursuit  of  those  merciful  consti- 
tutional provisions,  which  open  up  a  passage  from  the  hideous 
dungeon  of  slavery.  No !  never  can  we  suffer  those  noble- 
minded  Quakers  to  be  misrepresented  by  the  flattering  orator, 
who  would  rob  them  of  those  priceless  honors  purchased 
amidst  dangers  by  day  and  by  night  in  opening  their  doors 
to  the  hunted  fugitives,  and  closing  them  on  their  bloody 
pursuers ;  who  have  bound  up  their  wounds,  fed,  clothed, 
pitied,  nourished  and  cherished,  and  then  have  taken  those 
who  were  ready  to  perish,  and  carried  them,  night  after 
night,  on  their  way  to  the  land  of  freedom,  in  their  carriages, 
and  putting  money  in  their  hands  have  referred  them  to  the 
next  man  with  a  broad-brimmed  hat,  as  a  place  of  mercy,  and 
pointing  their  finger  to  the  North  Star,  which  never  sets, 
and  always  shines  as  the  slave's  compass,  hung  out  in  the 
heavens  to  direct  the  abused  man  in  his  lonesome  night  wan- 
dering, on  his  way  to  the  land  of  the  Lion  and  the  Unicorn — 
directs  them  to  the  land  where  the  eagles  of  British  mercy 
will  inclose  them  beneath  their  ample  wings,  and  make  them 
free  by  the  power  of  British  law  ;  where  the  pursuing  slave- 
holder will  cease  from  troubling  and  the  weary  slave  will  bo 
at  rest. 

These  men,  who,  in  the  last  thirty  years,  have  been  angels 
of  mercy  in  conducting  50,000  fugitives  to  Canada,  will  not 
thank  the  senator  for  his  left-handed  compliments. 

Mr.  Clay  will  do  well  to  remember  that  the  Friend,  the 
10 


218  ALVAN   STEWART. 

Quaker,  abhors  war,  and  no  war  so  much  as  the  continued 
war  between  master  and  slave,  and  that  even  Quakers  are  not 
such  profound  lovers  of  the  peace  of  the  Union,  and  the 
power  of  the  States,  but  what  they  would  not  fear  to  jeopar- 
dize the  former  and  curtail  the  latter,  if,  by  so  doing,  slavery 
might  end. 

The  second  class  of  Abolitioziists  named  by  the  orator,  he 
says  are  only  "  apparent "  Abolitionists,  because  the  right  of 
petition  is  supposed  by  them  to  be  violated,  and  therefore  he 
seems  to  infer  that  these  men  have  run  on  board  the  Abolition 
ship,  until  the  nation  has  passed  the  danger  of  violating  the 
Constitution  on  the  right  of  petition,  and  after  that  difficulty 
is  over,  they  will  all  be  out,  hurrahing  and  huzzaing,  for 
slavery  whips,  and  unpaid  labor,  again.  This  class  of  men  I 
am  an  entire  stranger  to,  having  never  seen  one  of  them ;  I 
cannot  say  but  what  Mr.  Clay  is  right.  His  knowledge  is 
great,  and  his  candor  in  describing  a  third  set  of  Abolitionists 
must  make  us  believe  that  he  cannot  be  mistaken. 


LETTER  TO   THOMAS  W.  GILMER, 

GOVERNOR    OF   VIRGINIA, 

In  answer  to  his  Proclamation  offering  a  reward  of  $3,000  for  the  delivery 
to  the  jailer,  at  Norfolk,  of  Peter  Johnson,  Edward  Smith  and  Isaac 
Gansey,  men  of  color,  residents  of  New  York,  attached  to  the  schooner 
Robert  Centre,  charged  with  stealing  a  negro  slave  named  Isaac,  the  pro- 
perty of  John  G.  Colley,  1841. 

His  EXCELLENCY  GOT.  GILMEK,  OF  VIRGINIA  : 

SIE  :  As  a  citizen  of  the  State  of  New  York,  and  as  a 
member  of  this  Republic,  I  cannot  deny  that  I  feel  a  deep 
interest  in  the  issue  which  you  and  the  lieut.-governor 
of  your  State,  have  seen  fit  to  create  and  tender  as  be- 
tween New  York  and  Virginia,  on  a  topic  of  the  most  solemn 
interest,  involving  the  dearest  rights  of  men,  the  personal 
liberties  not  only  of  the  citizens  of  the  State  of  New  York, 
but  also  of  those  of  other  States,  together  with  those  of  the 
stranger  and  visitor  from  other  countries.  The  question  is 
one  of  such  magnitude,  that  I  trust  it  will  be  considered  a 
sufficient  apology  for  the  humblest  citizen  to  run  and  shut  the 
door  against  the  approach  and  entrance  of  such  ill-omened 
principles,  which,  for  the  first  time,  by  ingenious  constructions, 
are  seeking  admission  into  that  group  of  fraternal  maxims, 
under  whose  benignant  sway  we  and  our  fathers  have  lived, 
protected  at  home,  and  have  been  defended  when  abroad. 

Your  predecessor,  in  July,  1839,  demanded  three  colored 
men  then  attached  to  the  schooner  Robert  Centre,  to  be 
surrendered  up  by  the  governor  of  this  State  to  the  authori- 
ties of  Virginia,  "  for  having  feloniously  stolen  from  one  John 

219 


220  ALVAN    STEWART. 

G.  Colley,  a  certain  negro  slave  named  Isaac,  the  property  of 
said  Colley."  Mr.  King,  mayor  of  Norfolk,  certifies  that 
Colley,  of  Norfolk,  made  an  oath  before  him,  of  which  the 
above  is  the  form  and  substance,  on  the  22d  July,  1839. 

These  are  the  facts.  This  is  the  case  made  by  Virginia. 
On  these  facts  you  reiterate  the  demand  of  your  predecessor, 
that  the  three  men  should  be  delivered  up  as  felons,  and  that 
you  intend  to  make  the  world  believe  you  are  in  earnest,  for 
since  the  governor  of  this  State  has  refused  compliance  with 
your  demand,  you  have  offered  a  reward  of  $3,000  to  any 
person  in  this  State,  or  your  own,  to  kidnap  them  and  sur- 
render  them  to  Virginia,  and  thus  violate  the  sovereignty  of 
New  York,  while  the  individuals  capturing,  kidnapping  and 
surrendering  these  men,  would  subject  themselves  to  be 
indicted  for  a  felony,  and  imprisoned,  from  five  to  ten  years, 
in  the  New  York  State  prison. 

It  may  be  added  as  a  part  of  the  facts,  in  this  place,  that  a 
search  was  made  on  board  the  Robert  Centre,  a  ship  lying  in 
the  port  of  New  York,  by  the  master  of  the  slave  Isaac,  or  his 
agent,  Avhere,  Isaac  being  found,  the  master  or  agent,  in 
defiance  of  the  law  of  Congress  of  1793,  without  examination 
before  any  court  or  judicial  authority,  and  in  defiance  of  the 
laws  of  this  State,  committed  a  felony,  punishable  for  several 
years  in  the  State  prison,  in  taking  Isaac  from  this  State 
without  lawful  authority  and  in  defiance  of  our  laws. 

But  dismissing  for  the  present  the  reward  of  $3,000  offered 
to  violate  the  sovereignty  of  New  York,  and  the  crime  of 
abduction  and  kidnapping  committed  by  the  citizens  of 
Virginia  on  Isaac,  we  will  return  to  the  consideration  of  the 
affidavit  made  before  the  mayor  of  Norfolk,  which  contains  a 
statement  of  your  case,  as  you  see  fit  to  make  it,  after  having 
been  admonished  by  the  governor  of  this  State,  that  it  might 
be  in  the  poAver  of  the  authorities  of  Virginia  to  amend  the 
affidavit  so  as  to  state  at  what  time  Isaac  was  stolen— the 


LETTER  TO   THE   GOVERNOR   OF  VIRGINIA.  221 

affidavit  being  silent  on  those  two  important  particulars,  as  to 
the  time  when  or  place  where  Isaac  was  stolen. 

On  a  case  which  is  entirely  silent  as  to  what  time,  in  the 
course  of  this  century,  the  crime  was  committed,  or  as  to 
what  place  on  this  globe  the  offence  was  perpetrated,  whether 
in  Virginia,  Vermont,  Jamaica,  France  or  Africa,  Virginia 
demands,  on  such  a  case,  a  surrender.  Virginia  does  not 
pretend  that  she  can  improve  her  affidavit,  on  reflection,  by 
fixing  either  time  or  place  of  offence  ;  but  demands  that  the 
governor  of  New  York,  with  the  aid  of  our  sheriffs  and  con- 
stables, should  break  into  the  houses  of  these  three  freemen 
at  midnight — take,  bind,  fetter  and  deliver  these  citizens  to  the 
waiting  authorities  of  Virginia. 

It  is  one  of  the  fundamental  rules  of  merciful  justice,  in- 
herited by  us  from  our  ancestors,  that  every  intendment 
shall  be  made  in  favor  of  the  innocence  of  the  accused  until 
the  contrary  is  made  to  appear.  Might  not  New  York  appeal 
to  the  candor  of  Virginia,  and  ask  if  the  delivery  of  the  ac- 
cused would  not  be  the  prostration  of  this  principle  ?  Would 
not  the  surrender  have  been  an  admission  of  what  Virginia 
dare  not  assert,  that  the  slave  was  stolen  from  her  jurisdiction  ? 

There  is  no  time  shown  when  this  pretended  felony  was 
committed,  whether  one  or  ten  years  before.  It  is  presumed, 
therefore,  that  if  the  offence  were  not  outlawed  by  lapse  of 
time,  the  same  would  have  appeared. 

For  it  will  not  be  pretended,  if  it  appeared  that  it  was 
impossible  to  convict  the  accused  on  the  face  of  the  papers 
accompanying  the  demand,  that  there  would  be  any  obliga- 
tion on  the  part  of  the  New  York  executive  to  surrender  and 
allow  Virginia  to  drag  her  citizens  from  500  to  800  miles,  to 
one  of  her  tribunals,  where  the  individual  must  be  acquitted. 
This  would  be  solemn  trifling,  as  between  the  States,  while  it 
might  be  destructive  to  the  peace  and  prosperity  of  the 
acquitted  citizen ! 


222  ALVAN   6TEWAKT. 

But  the  case  made  by  Virginia,  presenting,  the  great  inter- 
State  proposition  by  which  she  intends  to  abide,  nolens  volens, 
though  the  confederacy  is  dissolved  in  its  maintenance,  is 
simply  this  :  If  these  men  had  taken  Colley's  slave  from  him 
on  his  middle  passage  from  the  banks  of  the  Gambia,  in 
Africa,  under  the  line  of  the  equator,  on  the  high  seas,  and 
should  have  brought  him  back  to  New  York,  Virginia  could 
demand  his  surrender  ;  for,  if  this  affidavit  is  sufficient  to 
demand  the  accused  now,  it  would  be  in  the  case  supposed. 
Suppose  these  three  men  had  found  Colley  in  Africa,  in  his 
own  cabin,  throttling  Isaac  and  putting  his  fetters  on,  and 
should  have  delivered  Isaac,  and  have  afterward  been  found 
in  New  York,  this  affidavit,  if  held  good  now,  would  in  that 
case  compel  New  York  to  deliver  up. 

Suppose  these  men  to  have  taken  Isaac  from  Colley,  in  this 
State,  while  the  master  was  at  Saratoga  Springs,  if  this  affi- 
davit is  valid  for  the  surrender  of  these  citizens  now,  then,  in 
that  case,  Virginia  might  take  cognizance  of  criminal  offences 
committed  in  this  State;  yes,  she  might  draw  before  her 
tribunals  offences,  real  or  imaginary,  committed  against  her 
citizens  on  the  high  seas,  Africa,  New  York,  or  Vermont,  in 
any  time  past,  within  the  memory  of  man. 

Virginia's  proposition  is,  that  for  a  wrong  done  her  citizens, 
or  her  laws,  no  matter  when  or  where  committed,  whether  on 
this  side  of  the  Atlantic  or  the  other,  on  this  side  of  the 
Equator  or  the  other,  wherever  the  cold  freezes  or  heat 
warms,  if  the  culprit  is  found  in  any  one  of  the  twenty-six 
States,  the  Constitution  compels  the  executive  of  the  State 
where  the  accused  are  found,  to  surrender  them. 

Is  this  a  provison  of  the  Constitution  of  our  Union,  so  highly 
lauded  ?  No,  if  a  provision  had  been  offered  by  the  Con- 
vention of  the  American  people,  as  wide  in  its  power  of 
mischief  and  unchecked  tyranny,  as  Virginia  now  contends  for 
through  you,  the  American  people,  in  their  State  Conventions 


LETTER   TO   THE   GOVERNOR   OF   VIRGINIA.  223 

for  consideration  of  the  same,  would  have  vetoed  such  a  pro- 
vision with  such  a  roar  of  disapprobation,  as  that  its  last 
echoes  should  still  break  in  upon  the  slumbers  of  executive 
despotism  and  repress  the  first  yearnings  of  slavery's  grasp 
at  universal  dominion.  Must  slavery  be  maintained  at  the 
expense  of  universal  liberty  ?  Is  it  not  enough  that  your 
hand  is  at  the  throat  of  your  trembling  slave  ?  Must  the 
liberties  of  the  North  be  offered  as  a  sacrifice  to  such  a 
horrible  institution  ?  Am  I  not  in  danger,  if  your  construc- 
tion of  the  Constitution  were  right,  of  having  this  newspaper, 
if  perchance  a  stray  copy  should  reach  your  Excellency,  laid 
before  a  Norfolk  mayor  with  your  affidavit  that  in  this  paper 
I  had  refused  to  acknowledge  that  slavery  was  jure  divino, 
and  that  I  had  therefore  called  on  your  slaves  to  rise  in  insur- 
rection against  their  masters,  by  implication,  or  more  like  the 
present  affidavit,  you  should  swear  to  a  legal  conclusion,  that 
I  had  excited  insurrection,  and  that,  in  legal  contemplation, 
you  might  for  the  purpose  of  a  demand  of  my  person  from 
the  executive  of  this  State,  swear  that  there  was  not  a  head 
left  on  a  slaveholder's  shoulders  in  Virginia.  According  to 
your  affidavit,  it  is  no  matter  when  or  where  I  produced  the 
insurrection.  No  matter,  says  your  affidavit,  if  I  caused  an 
insurrection  of  slaves  twenty  years  ago,  and  hi  the  West 
Indies,  the  governor  of  New  York  is  yet  bound  to  deliver 
me  up  on  your  requisition.  The  doctrine  of  the  King  of 
England,  as  far  as  time  is  concerned,  must  apply  to  Virginia, 
Nuttum  tempus  occurrit  Virginia.  There  seem  to  be  attri- 
butes belonging  to  the  sovereignty  of  Virginia,  which  belong 
to  no  earthly  government  besides.  All  governments,  except 
Virginia,  seem  to  feel,  that,  however  lawless  their  desires, 
still,  a  prudent  respect  for  the  opinions  of  mankind  compels 
them  to  respect  time  and  place.  But  Virginia,  in  defence  of 
that  singularly  amiable,  evangelical  and  democratic  institu- 
tion of  slavery,  asserts  the  right  of  putting  on  the  attributes 


224  ALVAN  BTFWABT. 

of  Omnipotence — which  disregard  time  and  place — or  time 
and  space.  It  seems,  then,  that  it  is  time  for  mankind,  on 
this  and  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe,  in  every  parallel  of 
latitude  and  longitude,  savage  or  civilized,  Christian  or 
Mohammedan,  pagan  or  idolatrous,  to  open  their  eyes  to  the 
consideration  of  a  new  power  which  has  arisen  on  the  earth. 
It  takes  cognizance  of  all  transgressions  affecting  the  slave- 
holding  rights  of  Virginia — that  she  has  a  legal  ubiquity — no 
time,  no  space  can  fetter  the  application  of  her  vindictive 
visitorial  criminal  power,  when  put  forth  to  protect  that 
lovely  institution  of  unpaid  labor,  extracted  from  men  and 
women  by  the  singular  properties  and  blessed  agency  of  the 
Republican  Constitutional  cart-whip,  placed  in  the  hands  of 
Virginia,  as  the  governing  motive,  to  induce  her  to  enter  the 
confederacy  and  adopt  the  Constitution. 

But  it  is  hoped  that  Virginia  will  be  as  mild  and  forbearing 
as  the  necessities  of  the  "  peculiar  institution  "  will  permit, 
in  relation  to  her  sister  States,  and  the  other  states  and  king- 
doms of  the  world,  and  not  enforce  the  rights  of  Virginia  with 
too  much  rigor,  while  mankind  are  recovering  from  the  sur- 
prise felt  at  the  discovery  of  their  new  position.  For  the 
people  of  this  country,  at  least  of  these  States,  if  your  affidavit 
is  held  good,  must  feel  that  they  hold  their  existence  subject 
to  a  new  dangerous  tenure,  and  they  may  add  in  their  liturgy 
a  prayer,  that  "  from  sudden  death  or  transportation  to  Vir 
ffinia,  good  Lord  deliver  us." 

I  come  to  a  second  question  which  has  grown  out  of  this 
transaction,  which  I  hope  may  not  be  considered  improper, 
even  for  your  Excellency,  to  look  full  in  the  face.  And  that 
is,  by  what  authority,  the  man  Isaac — not  slave — the  man 
Isaac,  was  taken  in  the  port  of  New  York,  from  the  ship 
Robert  Centre,  by  the  two  white  men  of  Virginia,  who,  on 
finding  Isaac  in  this  ship,  without  any  judicial  process  what- 
soever, took  and  kidnapped  him  and  by  a  forcible  abduction, 


LETTER   TO   THE   GOVERNOR   OF   VIRGINIA.  225 

the  saM  Isaac,  against  his  will,  was  carried  from  the  free 
State  of  New  York,  into  the  State  of  Virginia,  and  made  a 
slave  of.  Isaac  was  brought  before  no  authority.  No  judge, 
court  or  justice  ever  gave  a  certificate,  in  this  State,  that 
Isaac  owed  service  to  any  person  in  Virginia. 

It  was  one  of  the  clearest  cases  of  kidnapping  which  can  be 
imagined.  By  the  Revised  Statutes  of  the  State  of  New 
York,  2d  vol.,  664th  page,  28th  section,  the  offence  and  pun- 
ishment are  described  in  these  words  :  "  Every  person  who 
shall  without  lawful  authority  forcibly  seize  and  confine  any 
other,  or  shall  inveigle  or  kidnap  any  other  with  intent  either 
1st.  To  cause  such  other  person  to  be  secretly  confined  or 
imprisoned  in  this  State  against  his  will,  or  2d.  To  cause  such 
other  person  to  be  sent  out  of  this  State  against  his  will, 
or,  3d.  To  cause  such  person  to  be  sold  as  a  slave  or  in  any 
way  held  to  service  against  his  will,  shall,  upon  conviction,  be 
punished  with  imprisonment  in  a  State  prison  not  exceeding 
ten  years."  Here  is  a  most  horrible  crime  committed  by  the 
insolence  of  slaveholders  breaking  in  upon  the  sovereignty  of 
New  York,  and  forcibly  carrying  away  a  human  being,  under 
the  protection  of  our  law  as  much  as  the  governor  of  this 
State.  And  the  sovereignty  of  New  York,  and  the  majesty 
of  her  laws,  would  have  been  no  more  injured  in  the  abduc- 
tion of  the  governor  or  chancellor  of  this  State,  than  of  the 
man  Isaac.  By  the  constitution  of  this  State,  all  men  are 
equal  in  the  eye  of  our  laws;  all,  equally  entitled  to  her 
beneficent  protection ;  the  highest  man  is  not  above  her 
power ;  the  humblest  is  secure  beneath  her  protection. 
With  our  constitution,  as  a  question  of  protection,  there  is 
no  high,  no  low,  no  black,  no  white,  no  slave,  no  master ;  no, 
the  law  is,  like  the  atmosphere,  stretched  over  the*  entire 
sovereignty  of  New  York,  furnishing  vitality  to  all,  it  is  the 
poor  man's  palladium,  the  aegis  of  the  rich  ;  the  poor  colored 
infant,  sleeping  in  its  cradle,  is  defended  against  the  prowling 
10* 


226  ALVAN    STEWART. 

kidnapper,  with  the  same  tender  solicitude,  which*  would 
defend  the  bishop  ministering  at  the  altar.  However 
despised  the  human  being  may  have  been  in  foreign  lands, 
however  scarred  with  the  slaveholder's  whip,  however 
broken  in  spirit.  Yes !  no  matter  if  he  has  been  made 
ignorant  of  his  high  destiny  by  law  ;  no  matter  if  he  has  been 
sold  on  a  thousand  auction  boards,  as  a  chattel ;  or  been  out- 
lawed for  seeking  liberty  ;  or  a  price  offered  for  his  head  by 
ferocious  brutality ;  or  if  wounds  inflicted  by  bloodhounds 
are  yet  unheeded  ;  or  if  hunger  and  poverty  have  left  but  the 
uncovered  framework  of  a  man ;  or  the  light  of  knowledge 
has  never  broken  in  upon  the  dark  chambers  of  his  sonl,  yet, 
the  moment  the  ship  brings  him  within  the  headlands  of  New 
York,  the  great  folds  of  her  constitutional  liberty  encircle  him 
as  a  garment,  her  humanity  lifts  him  up,  benevolence  feeds 
him  and  pours  oil  upon  his  wounds,  while  the  law,  stern, 
inflexible,  becomes  his  sentinel  to  guard  his  every  step  by  day 
and  defend  bis  sleep  by  night.  There  is  no  recognition  in 
this  State  of  that  infernal  maxim,  worthy  of  a  Jeffreys,  which 
prevails  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line,  by  which  a  colored 
man  is  presumed  a  slave  until  he  proves  the  negative. 

All  men  are  presumed  free  in  this  State.  Now  look  at  the 
crime  committed  against  the  constitution  and  laws  of  the 
State  of  New  York,  yes,  against  every  man,  woman  and 
child  who  breathes  within  our  limits,  by  the  forcible  abdica- 
tion of  the  man  Isaac  by  two  Virginia  kidnappers.  It  will 
not  help  the  matter  for  you  to  say  he  was  Colley's  slave. 
That  was  the  very  point  judicially  to  be  proved  under  the  act 
of  Congress,  1793,  and  under  the  statutes  of  New  York,  be- 
fore you  attempt  to  remove  him.  Have  the  slaveholder's 
words,  fJiat  a  man  is  a  slave  'become  judicial  proof,  record 
evidence  ?  Is  liberty  nothing  ?  Suppose  it  had  appeared 
that  Isaac  had  been  kidnapped  ten  years  before  from  this 
State,  and  carried  to  Virginia,  and  been  sold  a  dozen  times, 


LETTER  TO   THE   GOVERNOR   OF   VIRGINIA.  227 

he  would  have  been  a  free  man  still,  and  so  our  courts  would 
have  decided.  There  are  a  dozen  other  ways  by  which  a 
man  who  is  a  slave  may  become  free.  But  these  kidnappers 
seemed  to  think  that  there  was  no  mode  so  acceptable  as 
the  original  one  by  which  slavery  was  created  and  introduced 
into  the  world — the  knock  down  and  drag  out  title  ;  the  club- 
law  title  deed — and  under  that  title  is  Isaac  now  held.  Vir- 
ginia is  in  duty  bound  to  return  that  man  Isaac  to  the 
authorities  of  this  State,  where  the  kidnappers  found  him, 
and  if  Colley  had  any  claim  on  Isaac,  the  courts  are  open  for 
its  assertion. 

Again,  have  we  any  reason  to  believe  Virginia  would 
deliver  up  the  kidnappers,  on  the  requisition  of  the  governor 
of  this  State,  on  an  indictment  found  against  them  for  kid- 
napping ?  Virginia  may  have  the  opportunity  in  less  than 
six  months  to  see  what  she  will  do  ;  but  there  is  not  the 
least  reason  to  believe  that  Virginia,  who  talks  so  largely 
about  constitutional  compacts,  would  surrender  these  men  up. 
These  men  should  be  indicted  for  kidnapping  a  man  in  the 
State  of  New  York  and  carrying  him  away  into  perpetual 
and  hopeless  bondage,  while  the  three  men  you  have  offered 
the  $3,000  bounty  for,  according  to  your  own  account,  stole 
a  man  out  of  slavery  to  bring  him  into  the  daylight  of  liberty, 
into  a  free  State.  Look  at  the  character  of  the  offenders.  One 
set  of  men,  whom  you  demand  to  be  delivered  to  Virginia, 
their  crime  is  in  aiding  a  poor  slave  to  the  recovery  of  his  long- 
lost  liberty — the  most  holy,  precious  right  of  man — helping  a 
poor,  miserable  slave  to  escape  from  bitter  slavery,  a  life  used 
up  and  wasted  for  the  convenience  of  another,  helping  him  to 
escape  cruel  scourging,  hunger,  nakedness,  ignorance,  bru- 
tality, unrequited  toil  and  all  the  uncomputed  sorrows  of  a 
slave.  The  kidnappers  of  Virginia,  for  gold,  in  violation  of 
the  laws  of  the  Union  and  of  this  State,  ruthlessly,  without  a 
particle  of  authority,  laid  their  cruel  hands  upon  Isaac  and 


228  ALVAJ*   STEWART. 

forced  him  back  to  suffer  the  vengeance  of  an  enraged  master, 
who  will  glut  his  rage  on  the  unoffending  and  quivering  flesh 
of  poor  Isaac,  for  having  committed  high  treason  against  his 
authority,  for  the  great  crime  of  having  preferred  liberty  to 
slavery.  The  deed  done  by  the  three  New  York  men  is 
worthy  of  being  commemorated  as  the  three  men  of  the 
Revolution  were  honored,  who  delivered  up  Major  Andre. 
These  men,  if  they  did  what  you  allege,  to  aid  their  poor 
countryman  to  escape  slavery,  deserve  the  thanks  of  the 
civilized  and  Christianized  man  throughout  the  world ;  for 
they  are  like  the  poor  widow  whom  the  Saviour  commended 
for  throwing  her  mite  into  the  treasury:  she  did  what  she 
could — these  three  colored  men  did  what  they  could  to  miti- 
gate the  cruel  fate  of  poor  Isaac. 

The  insulted  sovereignty  of  New  York  is  wounded,  through 
the  sides  of  poor  Isaac,  and  cries,  like  the  blood  of  Abel,  to 
Heaven  for  vengeance  against  those  assassins  of  liberty, 
violators  of  law,  who  have  robbed  the  State  of  New  York  of 
her  peculiar  glory  of  defending  and  protecting  the  lowest  of 
our  species  from  all  injury  and  violence,  unless  done  by  the 
intervention  of  the  due  process  of  the  law.  But  these  kid- 
nappers of  Virginia  will  be  demanded,  but  will  not  be  sur- 
rendered. 

But,  sir,  there  is  one  point  in  this  controversy,  which  strikes 
me  as  the  most  alarming  feature  in  this  whole  traasaction, 
and  manifests,  to  my  mind,  the  reckless  daring  of  Virginia 
through  her  governor  which  is  unparalleled  in  the  annals  of 
State  intercourse  :  I  mean  your  offer  of  $3,000  reward  for  the 
men  you  are  pleased  to  call  fugitives.  To  do  you  no  injustice, 
your  proclamation  is  here  given  verbatim  : 

"BY  THE  GOVERNOR  OF  THE  STATE  OF  VIRGINIA — PROCLAMATION : 

"  Whereas,  a  felony  was  committed  at  Norfolk,  in  the  State  of 
Virginia,  in  the  month  of  July,  1839,  by  PETER  JOHNSON,  EDWARD 


LETTER   TO    THE    GOVERNOR   OF   VIRGINIA.  229 

SMITH  and  ISAAC  GANSEY  orGARSEY,  men  of  color,  at  the  time  attached 
to  the  schooner  Eobert  Centre,  and  believed  to  have  been  residents 
of  the  city  or  State  of  New  York,  where  they  may  probably  be  found, 
and  the  said  Peter  Johnson,  Edward  Smith  and  Isaac  Gansey  or 
Garsey  have  fled  from  justice  and  are  now  going  at  large ;  therefore, 
I,  Thomas  W.  Gilmer,  governor  of  the  State  of  Virginia,  have  thought 
proper  to  issue  this  proclamation  of  $1,000  to  any  person  or  persons 
who  will  apprehend  and  convey  to  the  jail  of  the  borough  of  Norfolk, 
any  one  of  said  offenders ;  of  $3,000  upon  the  delivery  of  all  of  them 
to  the  jailer  of  said  borough  of  Norfolk.  And  I  do  moreover  require 
all  officers  of  this  State,  civil  and  military,  and  earnestly  BEQUEST  all 
persons  within  or  without  the  limits  thereof  to  use  their,  utmost 
exertions  to  apprehend  the  said  felons,  that  they  may  be  brought  to 
justice. 

"  Given  under  my  hand  as  governor  and  under  the  seal  of  the  State 
at  Richmond,  this  13th  day  of  November,  1840,  and  the  60th  year  of 
the  commonwealth. 

"  THOMAS  "W.  GILMER. 

"  '  National  Intelligencer '  will  please  insert  six  times. — Nov.  17th." 

This  proclamation  is  a  renunciation  on  the  part  of  Virginia, 
of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  at  a  time  when  she 
is  pleading  with  New  York  for  its  punctilious  and  most 
solemn  observance  in  relation  to  these  same  three  men  for 
whom  you  have  offered  this  enormous  reward.  This  is  anew 
mode  of  appeal  from  the  decision  of  the  governor  of  New 
York.  The  governor  of  New  York  says  to  you,  "  These  men 
have  committed  no  felony  or  crime  acknowledged  by  the 
laws  of  nations,  or  of  this  State,  and  cannot  be  delivered  up 
to  the  authorities  of  Virginia,  in  pursuance  of  the  Constitu- 
tion and  the  laws  of  Congress."  You  then  offer  an  enormous 
bribe  to  any  miserable  caitiff  who  may  be  found  in  Virginia, 
New  York,  or  in  any  other  State,  or  in  fact  to  any  foreigner 
who  has  the  brutal  courage  to  commit  the  crime  of  kidnap- 
ping on  these  men,  and  a  high-handed  felony  against  the  laws 
of  New  York,  to  deliver  these  innocent  men  into  your  pos- 


230  ALVAN   STEWART. 

session.  Whoever  should  be  deluded,  in  this  State,  Virginia, 
or  elsewhere,  to  arrest  and  convey  these  men  under  your 
proclamation  to  Virginia,  would  come  within  the  tremendous 
penalties  of  the  statute  of  this  State,  already  cited,  especially 
the  2d  clause  of  the  28th  section,  which  says,  that,  whoever 
shall,  without  lawful  authority,  forcibly  seize  or  confine 
another ;  "  to  cause  such  other  person  to  be  sent  out  of  this 
State  against  his  will,  shall  be  punished  in  the  State  prison  not 
exceeding  ten  years." 

You  therefore  perceive,  that  you  have  offered  $3,000,  not 
to  honor  the  law,  but  to  break  the  laws  of  a  sister  State,  and 
involve  the  transgressors  in  the  most  serious  calamities,  from 
having  been  seduced  by  your  gubernatorial  bribe.  And 
these  men-thieves,  if  Virginia  did  not  throw  off  the  obliga- 
tions imposed  by  the  Constitution,  must  be  delivered  up  as 
kidnappers,  who  had  been  seduced  by  your  bribe  to  the  com- 
mission of  this  crime. 

This  law  of  New  York  was  made  to  protect  her  citizens 
and  its  own  sovereignty,  against  the  machinations  of  foreign 
intruders,  whether  they  be  governors  or  individuals.  You 
could  not  refuse  to  deliver  up  those  who  earn  your  bribe  and 
flee  to  you  for  protection ;  for  it  will  not  be  pretended,  but 
that,  by  the  laws  of  Virginia  and  the  law  of  nations,  the 
violent  and  forcible  abduction  of  free  men  by  an  unauthorized 
force  from  their  own  State  to  a  foreign  one,  is,  and  always 
has  been,  regarded  as  one  of  the  highest  crimes  which  could 
be  committed. 

But  there  is  one  point  of  view  connected  with  your  extra- 
ordinary proclamation,  which,  I  cannot  deny,  excites  in  my 
mind  a  most  tender  commiseration  for  your  own  personal 
safety,  in  case  your  bribe  to  rob  these  three  colored  men  of 
their  liberty  should  be  found  effectual,  and  they  should  be  car- 
ried out  of  this  State.  I  am  serious,  sir,  when  I  tell  you, 
that  your  own  personal  liberty  is  in  danger  every  moment ; 


LETTER   TO   THE   GOVERNOR   OF   VIRGINIA.  231 

for  if  the  colored  men  should  be  carried  off  to  Virginia  by 
the  stimulus  of  your  bribe,  you  could,  yea  more,  you  would 
be  indicted  in  some  one  of  the  counties  of  this  State  through 
which  the  colored  men  were  abducted,  as  the  procuring 
cause  of  their  arrest,  as  the  principal  felon ;  for  you  say  in  your 
proclamation,  that  you  "  earnestly  request  all  persons  within 
or  without  the  limits  of  Virginia  to  use  their  utmost  exer- 
tions to  apprehend  them  ;"  and  you  say  they  are  probably  in 
the  City  or  State  of  New  York.  Your  object  is,  therefore, 
relieved  of  every  ambiguity  ;  it  is  to  get,  by  the  means  of 
these  3,000  pieces  of  silver,  the  innocent  betrayed  into  your 
hands. 

There  is  not  a  lawyer  in  the  United  States  who  is  entitled 
to  the  appellation,  who  would  not  agree  in  pronouncing 
judgment  against  you,  as  the  main  felon,  under  our  law,  in 
case  these  men  were  arrested  by  that  proclamation  in  this 
State  and  carried  to  Norfolk  jail,  in  Virginia.  You  "  entreat " 
A  to  murder  B — you  "entreat"  C  to  burn  the  house 
of  D — you  "  entreat "  E  to  rob  F  of  his  purse ;  if  your 
entreaties  are  complied  with,  is  there  a  criminal  authority, 
in  England  or  this  country,  which  would  not  pronounce  you 
a  murderer  in  the  first,  guilty  of  arson  in  the  second,  and  of 
robbery  in  the  third  cases  supposed  ?  You  must  remember, 
you  have  no  authority  in  the  State  of  New  York,  unless  our 
governor  delivers  the  fugitives  to  you  on  your  requisition. 
By  entreating  another  to  kidnap  and  carry  these  men  off, 
you  become  a  trespasser,  "  ab  initio  y"  and  come  within  the 
maxim,  "  Qui  facit  per  alium,  facit  per  se."  Remember 
when  an  indictment  is  once  found,  the  offence  will  never  be 
outlawed,  although  you  might  refuse  to  deliver  yourself  up 
for  two  or  three  years  to  come,  while  governor ;  but  that  is 
a  long  road  Avhich  never  turns,  and  the  moment  you  ceased  to 
be  governor,  your  successor's  first  act,  if  he  did  his  duty, 
would  be  to  deliver  you  up  on  the  requisition  of  the  governor 


232  ALVAN    STEWART. 

of  this  State,  to  come  here,  be  tried,  condemned,  and  tmdergo, 
for  ten  years  or  less,  in  our  State  prison,  a  felon's  fate,  and 
there  learn  to  sympathize  with  the  three  colored  men  whom 
you  wickedly  caused  to  be  dragged  from  their  own  State  to 
waste  their  lives  in  Virginia's  penitentiary  cells,  for  an  act 
which  the  Creator  of  all  men  had  declared  to  be  one  of  the 
duties  of  man  to  man,  "  to  deliver  the  oppressed." 

And  who  has  converted  one  of  the  duties  enjoined  by  our 
common  Creator  into  a  crime  ?  A  community  of  slave- 
holders. Why  ah1  this  trouble  and  distress,  which  seem  to 
threaten  this  Republic  and  individuals?  The  answer  is  as 
easy  to  give  as  it  is  disgracefully  painful  to  state.  Slavery, 
the  principle  of  taking  man  and  converting  him  into  a  chattel, 
into  property,  by  thrusting  him  down  from  his  lofty  estate, 
to  stand  on  a  level,  in  a  legal  point,  with  the  lowing  ox,  and 
neighing  horse.  To  talk  of  regulating  such  an  institution  as 
slavery,  by  constitutions,  just  and  equitable  laws,  in  which 
two  communities  must  administer  these  constitutions  and 
laws,  the  one  a  community  of  freemen,  sensitively  alive  to 
personal  liberty  ;  the  other  a  community  of  slaveholders,  who, 
have  to  reverse,  as  it  regards  one  half  of  its  own  population, 
all  the  rules  of  morality  and  justice,  and  apply  the  rules 
which  govern  beasts,  to  men ;  these  States  must  necessarily 
be  in  eternal  conflict  until  liberty  conquers  slavery,  or  slavery 
overturns  the  liberty  of  all.  The  vicious  principle  which  has 
been  admitted  into  the  Republic  of  slavery,  forbids  the  pos- 
sibility of  our  complicated  system  of  liberty  and  slavery,  in 
juxtaposition,  surviving  the  shocks  to  which  it  must  be  con- 
stantly exposed,  in  endeavoring  to  maintain  propositions  in 
eternal  hostility  to  each  other. 

As  to  the  great  argument  put  forth  by  Gov.  Seward,  it  is 
a  perfect  justification  of  the  course  he  has  adopted  in  assert- 
ing that  the  offence  charged  by  Virginia  is  not  one  known  by 
the  laws  of  this  State  or  the  law  of  nations,  and  that  Gov- 


LETTER  TO  THE  GOVERNOR  OF  VIRGINIA.  233 

ernor  Seward  is  to  be  the  judge  whether  the  alleged  offender 
has  committed  such  an  offence  for  which  he  will  surrender  up 
or  not.  If  the  argument  of  the  governor  of  New  York  is 
not  sound,  personal  liberty  rests  on  a  foundation  of  sand,  and 
we  are  in  jeopardy  every  hour.  My  remarks  were  intended  for 
the  defects  in  the  affidavit  of  time  and  place,  which  Virginia 
refused  to  amend,  if  she  could ;  being  determined  to  extend 
by  that  operation,  the  dominion  of  slaveholding  over  a  terri- 
tory hitherto  uncouquered  from  liberty.  2d.  I  examined  the 
high-handed  and  unauthorized  transgression  of  our  sove- 
reignty in  kidnapping  Isaac  by  citizens  of  Virginia. 
3d.  The  unparalleled  attempt  by  the  corruption  of  a  large 
bribe,  on  your  part  offered  by  proclamation,  by  which  you 
entreat  persons  to  come  here  and  abduct,  in  defiance  of 
severe  laws  of  this  State  against  the  offence,  the  three  men. 
Hoping  that  you  may,  in  the  calmness  of  retirement,  review 
your  course  and  turn  your  eyes  to  the  tremendous  machinery 
which  has  been  called  into  line  for  action  against  these  men, 
to  wit,  your  immense  bribe,  your  State  legislature,  and  your 
auxiliaries,  the  other  slaveholding  States ;  all  of  this  array  of 
force  is  about  to  measure  swords  with  the  free  State  of  New 
York  to  compel  us,  by  appealing  to  our  fears,  since  you  have 
failed  to  convince  our  understanding,  to  acknowledge  the 
unlimited  diminion  of  slavery  over  liberty  herself. 

However  this  matter  may  eventuate,  it  will  be  the  conso- 
lation of  Gov.  Seward,  that  he  did  what  he  could  to  vindi- 
cate and  defend  the  liberty  of  the  Republic  from  the  assaults 
of  a  grasping  and  relentless  despotism,  seeking  to  override 
the  great  barriers  of  constitutional  freedom,  purchased  by 
the  blood,  and  defended  by  the  bravery  of  our  ancestors. 


AN    ADDRESS, 

BY  THE   "  NATIONAL  COMMITTEE  OF  CORRESPONDENCE," 

APPOINTED  BY  THE  CONTENTION  WHICH  NOMINATED  JAMES  G 
BIRNET  FOR  PRESIDENT,  AND  THOMAS  EARLE  FOR  VICE-PRESI- 
DENT OF  THE  UNITED  STATES,  IN  APRIL,  1840,  AT  THE  CITY 
OF  ALBANY. 

To  the  friends  of  Liberty  and  of  the  oppressed  in  the  United  States,  who 
intend  to  honor  the  "  high  obligation  resting  on  the  People  of  the  Free 
States  to  remove  slavery  by  moral  and  political  action,  as  prescribed  in  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,"  the  following  address  is  most  respect- 
fully submitted  by  the  National  Committee  of  Correspondence. 

MEN,  BRETHREN,  FELLOW-LABORERS,  FELLOW-CITIZENS,  AND 

FRIENDS  : 

The  work  of  republican  reformation  is  begun.  Hu- 
manity, a  new  element,  has  been  found  in  the  ballot-boxes  of 
1840.  The  voice  of  stern  justice  is  beginning  to  speak  from 
a  new  place.  The  power  which  will  overthrow  slavery  has 
been  discovered ;  it  is  the  terse  literature  of  the  northern 
ballot-box. 

The  groans  of  three  millions  of  bondmen  have  penetrated 
the-ballot  box,  the  abode  of  the  sovereign's  opinions.  The 
ceaseless  cry  of  the  slave  is  respected  in  a  new  quarter. 
Every  independent  freeman  is  an  American  sovereign,  and  is 
proprietor  of  a  portion  of  that  power  which  can  destroy 
slavery.  It  is  his  sovereignty,  his  manhood,  his  abstract 
right,  enforced  into  a  stern  reality ;  it  is  his  ballot  in  the  box. 
There  have  been  found,  for  the  first  time,  in  1840,  electoral 
tickets  for  President  and  Vice-President  of  the  United  States, 
in  the  ballot  urn,  the  names  of  men  who  would  employ  all 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS.  235 

just  and  constitutional  means  to  elevate  the  chatteled  slave  to 
a  fellow  sovereign — a  freeman. 

All  men  are  ready  to  inquire,  can  slaves  be  made  into 
freemen,  at  the  polls  ?  We  answer,  YES  :  and  six  thousand 
voters,  at  the  late  election,  in  our  free  States,  have  said  the 
same. 

Six  thousand  men  have  refused  longer  to  make  the  condi- 
tion of  the  slave  more  hopeless,  by  clothing  his  master  and 
the  pro-slavery  man  with  power  to  further  crush  him  down. 
But  these  six  thousand  men  have  said  by  their  votes,  "  We 
will  employ  our  power  to  deliver,  not  to  bind ;  to  set  free, 
not  to  imprison ;  to  make  freemen,  not  slaves ;  to  make  a 
republic,  not  a  despotism ;  to  make  men,  not  things ;  to 
increase  our  wealth,  not  our  poverty ;  to  sustain  our  religion, 
and  not  abolish  it ;  to  preserve  the  Union,  not  to  dissolve  it ; 
to  make  the  New  World  the  abode  of  freedom,  and  not  the 
habitation  of  voiceless  bondage." 

These  six  thousand  men  hope,  with  the  assistance  of  others, 
to  present  8,000  specimens  of  slave  chattels,  in  the  District 
of  Columbia,  converted  into  men,  with  an  "  inalienable  right 
to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness." 

To  secure  this  glorious  object,  every  freeman  in  the  United 
States  is  invited  to  come  to  our  assistance,  at  every  corpora- 
tion, village,  town,  county,  State,  and  Presidential  election, 
from  this  hour  until  the  general  jubilee  shall  ring  from  Lake 
Memphremagog  to  the  waters  of  Ponchartrain ;  from  the 
Penobscot  to  the  Colorado.  For  these  six  thousand  men 
believe  that  to  secure  this  grand  object,  the  voting  literature 
of  the  nation  must  not  be  false  to  freedom,  containing  slave- 
holding  and  pro-slavery  names,  which  is  the  substance  of  the 
present  emission  of  the  ballot-box,  and  must  be  expurgated. 
For  who  would  believe  that  for  half  of  a  century,  the  majority 
of  names  found  in  those  boxes,  who  have  governed  this  land, 
was  in  favor  of  aristocracy  founded  on  the  skin,  caste,  unpaid 


236  ALVAN  STEWART. 

wages,  violence,  blood,  sale  of  human  flesh,  separation  of 
husbands  and  wives,  parents  and  children,  ignorance,  irreli- 
gion,  infidelity,  atheism,  adultery,  stealing,  robbery,  hunger, 
nakedness,  broken  limbs,  crushed  hearts,  lunacy,  idiocy, 
mutilated  limbs,  scourged  backs,  the  slash  of  bowie  knives, 
duels,  assassinations,  war,  murder,  the  pursuing  of  slaves  with 
bloodhounds,  idleness,  licentiousness,  coerced  amalgamation, 
poverty,  pride,  contempt  of  labor,  insolvency,  gambling, 
cockfighting,  horse-racing,  piracy  sanctioned  by  law,  outlawry 
for  love  of  liberty,  with  coffles,  whips,  fetters  and  chains,  as 
the  badges  of  undone  men. 

These  law-makers  have  seen  the  South  taking  from  the 
North,  under  the  shape  of  credit,  for  twenty-five  years  past, 
ten  millions  per  annum,  to  supply  the  deficiency  which  the 
whip  could  not  extort  from  their  own  slaves,  never  to  be 
repaid.  Northern  manufactories  are  now  standing  still  for 
want  of  money  abstracted  by  the  South  to  maintain  slavery 
in  its  idleness,  and  despotism  in  its  dignity,  and  free  laborers 
are  thrown  out  of  employ,  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  live 
on  the  unpaid  labor  of  the  slaves. 

The  slave  power  in  the  halls  of  our  national  legislature  has 
so  molded  the  political  economy  of  the  country  as  to  cripple 
the  interests  of  free  labor,  derange  northern  capital,  and  re- 
duce the  free  North,  as  far  as  possible,  to  the  level  of  the 
enslaved  South,  and  thus  secure  between  the  free  and  the 
slave  States  that  balance  of  power  which,  on  a  system  of  equal 
legislation,  the  South  could  never  attain. 

We  have  here  set  down  some  of  the  curses  of  slavery, 
which  have  so  many  distinct  names  in  our  language.  Each 
of  these  vipers  has  been  sustained  by  consent  of  American 
law  makers,  in  sucking  the  warm  heart's  blood  of  this  nation, 
until  the  country  staggers  from  debility.  "We  have  seen  the 
frown  of  heaven  lowering  on  this  land,  in  the  tempests  of  the 
ocean,  hi  the  tornadoes  of  the  land,  the  fires  in  our  cities,  our 


23T 

villages,  our  steamboats,  wasting  pestilence,  and  bloody 
wars.  We  have  seen  a  thousand  savages  maintaining  against 
us  a  five  years'  war,  while  the  bones  of  our  youth  are  left  to 
whiten  amid  the  everglades  of  Florida.  We  have  seen  the 
value  of  property  changed  from  the  most  extravagant  estima- 
tion to  the  lowest  depression ;  bankruptcies  unparalleled  in 
the  history  of  a  civilized  people ;  States  as  well  Its  individuals 
dishonoring  their  engagements  in  foreign  lands,  as  well  as  at 
home  ;  general  ruin  has  stared  all  men  full  in  the  face ;  and 
these  things,  it  is  believed,  are  sent  from  the  armory  of  the 
Almighty,  as  avengers  of  his  wronged  and  insulted  people, 
whom  we  have  crushed  as  slaves  under  our  feet,  and  have 
refused  to  listen  to  their  cries,  in  our  pulpits,  our  press,  our 
State  or  Congressional  legislation.  Yes,  the  present  Con- 
gress has  broken  down  the  Constitution  of  the  land  in  its 
zeal  to  silence  the  voice  of  petition.  In  this,  our  Repxiblican 
representatives  have  outstripped  the  boldest  and  wildest 
flights  of  despotic  fanaticism — have  attempted  to  legislate 
away  human  nature  itself— have  taken  to  themselves  a  seat 
beyond  and  without  the  pale  of  civilized  legislation  among 
men.  And  all  this,  to  show  their  humble  devotion  to  the 
slave  power. 

The  great  political  doctors  of  this  land  have  felt  of  the 
nation's  pulse,  looked  her  in  the  face,  inquired  for  all  symp- 
toms, modes  of  diet,  manner  of  repose,  and  her  sort  of  amuse- 
ments and  various  exercises.  One  set  of  these  pro-slavery 
physicians  profess  to  have  discovered  nothing  but  a  corn  011 
one  of  the  toes,  while  the  other  thinks  a  little  more  exercise 
would  give  a  finer  flow  of  animal  spirits,  and  relieve  the 
patient  from  a  certain  dyspepsia  or  sleeplessness  which  he 
has  discovered.  In  vain  do  we  point  them  to  the  festering 
sore  that  must  be  probed  to  the  bottom,  and  without  delay, 
lest  the  deadly  gangrene  ensue.  We  are  told  that  the  patient 
was  born  into  the  world  with  that  ulcer,  that  although  it  has 


238  ALVAU   STEWART. 

increased  five-fold,  and  is  abstractly  an  evil,  and  might  ab- 
stractly be  considered  the  cause  of  an  abstract  ailment,  and 
an  abstract  lingering,  and  may  be  followed  by  an  abstract 
death,  but  surely  nothing  more,  unless  it  was  abstractly 
buried  in  an  abstract  grave.  The  pro-slavery  doctors  have 
hunted  for  all  causes  for  the  afflictions  of  their  patient  except 
the  right  oneT 

To  drop  our  figure,  it  seems  plain  that  one  million  two 
hundred  thousand  laborers,  especially  if  they  are  slaves,  can 
never  maintain  four  millions  five  hundred  thousand  idle  peo- 
ple, who  have  so  many  extravagances  to  gratify.  If  slavery 
were  abolished  this  day,  the  slaves,  as  freemen,  would  from 
the  stimulus  of  reward,  produce  double  what  is  now  extracted 
from  them,  and  with  vastly  less  pain.  Again,  there  is  nearly 
one  million  of  idle  poor  men  and  women  in  the  South,  who 
are  very  poor,  but  still  refuse  to  work,  as  it  is  disgraceful  for 
white  people  to  labor,  in  a  slave  country.  This  million  would 
rejoice  to  labor  for  its  reward,  when  its  disgrace  was 
removed.  The  South  and  North  would  immediately  flourish, 
and  at  least  fifty  millions  of  permanent  wealth  be  added  to 
the  nation  annually ;  and  the  solid  happiness  of  the  nation 
doubled,  besides  being  relieved  from  those  periodical  spasms 
and  insolvencies  which  so  seriously  convulse  it  every  seven  or 
eight  years.  The  danger  of  insurrection  at  home,  or  invasion 
from  abroad  would  be  removed  to  an  interminable  distance. 

Each  of  the  great  parties  in  this  country,  for  the  sake  of 
political  power,  has  bowed  with  the  most  fawning  submission 
to  the  two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  piratical  janizaries,  the 
men-consumers  of  the  republic,  and  agreed,  for  the  sake  of 
power,  to  stand  guard,  night  and  day,  as  sentinels,  armed  to 
the  teeth,  on  the  confines  of  man-chattelism,  to  defend  the 
two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  men-appropriators  in  their 
heaven-abhorred  villainy,  against  the  insurrection  of  the  op- 
pressed, or  the  invasion  of  holy  and  legal  philanthropy. 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS.  239 

The  present  Whig  party,  which  has  swept  over  the  land 
with  the  power  of  a  tornado,  has  acted  hi  subservience  to  the 
slaveholder.  The  northern  ballot-box  is  crimsoned  with  the 
blood  of  the  slave,  both  parties  having  laid  him  on  the  altar 
of  venality,  as  a  sacrifice  to  propitiate  the  goddess  of  power, 
and  have  thus  sought  her  favor,  the  one  party  by  the  dex- 
terity with  which  they  laid  on  the  wood,  while  the  other,  not 
to  be  outdone,  displayed  a  cultivated  vigor  in  binding  the 
victim.  The  successful  party,  who  bound  the  sacrifice,  will 
move  around  that  altar,  and  install  their  high  priest  in  solemn 
form,  when  he  will  be  called  on  to  swear  to  defend  the  victim 
and  the  altar  from  intrusion,  by  the  blood  of  Bunker  Hill,  by 
the  retreating,  shoeless,  blood-tracking  soldiers  of  the  Revo- 
lution, and  as  he  marches  around  the  blue  flames,  will  further 
swear  by  the  Goddess  of  Liberty  and  by  the  liturgy  of  equal 
rights,  by  the  length  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line,  by  the  awful 
and  unrevealed  mysteries  of  the  implied  compact,  by  that 
uplifting  faith  which  grows  stronger  and  stronger,  as  the 
evidence  on  which  it  rests  grows  weaker  and  weaker,  by  the 
high  commands  of  the  unwritten  part  of  our  Constitution,  by 
its  wonderful  power  to  repeal  the  written  portion,  by  the 
surprising  wisdom  each  white  man  possesses  to  make  a  con- 
stitution for  every  black  man,  as  he  runs  along,  by  all  that  is 
glorious  in  white,  by  all  that  is  contemptible  in  Hack,  by  all 
that  is  tremendous  in  color,  by  all  that  is  sublime  in  straight 
hair,  by  all  that  is  horrible  in  kinked,  "  I,  William  Henry 
Harrison,  President  of  the  United  States,  as  Martin  Van 
Buren  did  before  me,  will  forever  protect  the  altar  of  slavery, 
with  its  victims,  from  all  encroachments  by  the  humane ;  I, 
the  said  President,  affirm  there  is  no  human  arm  so  mighty, 
no  constitution  so  strong,  no  philanthropy  so  penetrating,  no 
democracy  so  flagrant  as  to  be  able  to  unbind  one  of  those 
chatteled  victims."  The  President  and  Vice-President  of  the 
United  States  elect,  have  declared,  yea,  pledged  themselves 


24:0  ALVAN   8TEWAKT. 

to  maintain  the  greatest  he  in  the  universe — that  a  father  can 
chattelize  his  own  child,  into  a  slave ;  that  the  insolence  of 
piracy  is  true  southern  chivalry ;  that  a  human  flesh-proprietor 
has  a  right  to  make  others  groan  with  pain  that  he  may  sing 
for  joy ;  to  make  others  go  hungry,  that  he  may  be  fed  to  the 
full ;  to  wear  out  others  that  he  may  be  well  preserved ;  to 
make  others  lie  on  the  cold  ground  that  he  may  lie  canopied 
on  his  bed  of  down  ;  to  cause  other  men's  wives  to  be  sold  to 
buy  ottomans  for  his  own  ;  to  send  his  own  colored  children 
to  be  sold  in  a  market  that  his  white  ones  may  be  educated 
in  a  college  ;  to  send  other  men's  sons  to  be  wasted  with  toil 
in  the  fogs  of  a  rice  swamp,  that  on  the  avails  his  son  may 
whirl  and  dance  in  the  circle  of  fashion. 

It  is  held  to  be  the  prerogative  of  constitutional  highway- 
mauism  to  have  the  custody  of  treason's  beetle  and  wedges  to 
split  this  Union  from  end  to  end.  These  patent  right  Union- 
splitters  follow  their  profession,  for  the  profits  of  the  pursuit, 
from  the  instinct  of  gam,  as  a  mode  of  aweing  northern  free- 
men to  silence,  while  they  more  quietly  devour  their  domestic 
prey.  It  is  a  part  of  the  slaveholder's  birthright,  that  if  the 
business  of  slavery  is  in  danger  of  being  shorn  of  its  profits, 
he  may  embark  in  high  treason  as  a  kindred  pursuit,  but  more 
exalted,  as  a  man  who  has  served  an  apprenticeship  in  the 
destruction  of  the  rights  of  men  must  necessarily  have  a 
greater  prospect  of  success  than  other  men,  when  he  raises 
the  standard  of  treason,  and  seeks  to  enslave  his  country  and 
rob  it  of  its  independence,  as  he  has  individuals  of  their 
liberty.  A  slaveholder  must  be  indebted  for  his  prosperity 
either  to  the  destruction  of  the  freedom  of  his  country,  or  of 
single  persons.  He  is  a  liberty  consumer,  either  by  retail  or 
at  wholesale.  It  is  by  force  of  the  foregoing  principle,  that 
the  South  have  supplied  the  ten  millions  of  deficit  of  their 
own  slaves,  by  thrusting  their  greedy  fingers  into  the  pockets 
of  northern  industry.  Violent  changes  in  the  general  policy 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS.  241 

of  this  nation  they  have  always  promoted,  as  the  bankrupt- 
cies consequent  thereon,  and  the  great  uproar  of  distress, 
have  enabled  them  to  charge  to  the  account  of  the  govern- 
ment, that  which  has  sprung  from  the  ruinous  credit  obtained 
by  slaveholders  in  the  North,  to  supply  that  inability  which 
slavery  has  to  maintain  itself.  Thus  we  have  been  in  the 
I'oar  and  noise  of  embargoes,  non-intercourse  laws,  war,  a 
United  States  Bank — expiring  as  unconstitutional,  a  tariff  as 
necessary,  a  Bank  of  the  United  States  again  chartered  as 
constitutional,  again  overthrown  as  unconstitutional,  a  high 
tariff  imposed  by  the  South,  till  it  was  discovered  by  them 
to  be  unconstitutional,  nullification,  splitting  the  Union,  se- 
cession ;  till  Henry  Clay  and  John  C.  Calhoun  compromised 
the  tariff  to  death.  The  South,  by  its  vote  declared  the  late 
war,  in  opposition  to  the  desire  of  the  merchant  and  the 
sailors,  from  the  pretended  yearnings  of  humanity,  to  rescue 
and  protect  six  hundred  seamen,  impressed  into  the  British 
service  under  the  plea  that  they  were  British  subjects,  where 
they  received  the  accustomed  wages  of  seamen ;  while  at 
this  very  time  the  South  depended  for  their  very  existence 
upon  the  labor  of  two  millions  of  men,  women,  and  children, 
impressed,  yea,  enslaved  by  them,  without  wages — and  said 
slaves  were  themselves  property.  Thus  we  went  on  ;  amidst 
the  confused  din  and  hideous  uproar  of  these  multitudinous 
changes  in  fifty  years  occasioned  by  the  systematic  disturb- 
ance by  the  votes  of  the  South  of  any  and  every  settled 
policy.  In  this  endless  fluctuation  and  change  has  the  South 
robbed  the  North  of  two  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  dollars 
to  maintain  her  dreadful  system,  thus  taking  by  fraud  the 
labor  of  the  free  to  make  up  what  the  slave  could  not  earn. 
All  this  has  been  done  to  allow  no  particular  branch  of  busi- 
ness to  wear  itself  a  safe  channel  before  the  South  proposed 
a  change.  These  changes  in  legislation  are  southern  apolo- 
gies for  those  enormous  unpaid  balances  due  the  North, 
11 


242  ALVAN   STEWART. 

which  changes  were  procured  for  the  sake  of  the  apology,  to 
defraud  the  North,  which  has  been  running  down  the  fright- 
ful precipice  of  bankruptcy  in  caravans,  in  consequence  of 
these  things. 

The  mighty  and  powerful  party  newly  arrived  at  the 
palace  of  power,  has  reached  the  same  by  promising  to  guard, 
perpetuate,  and  even  strengthen  the  great  walls  of  slavery, 
while  they  fortify  its  outposts. 

This  great  party  has  supplanted  its  rivals  in  the  aflections 
of  the  South.  Yet  we  lament  that  this  powerful  party  should 
not  have  reserved  even  a  formal  salutation  for  liberty. — No, 
the  cause  of  liberty  must  not  expect  more  from  this  party 
than  its  predecessor.  No,  not  one  fetter  will  be  broken,  not 
one  tear  wiped  away  from  the  cheek  of  the  friendless  slave. 
We  suppose  the  Whigs  will  reprint,  as  a  second  edition,  the 
Democratic  programme  of  northern  subserviency  to  the  South, 
of  which  they  once  so  loudly  complained.  But  we  feel  assured 
there  are  thousands  and  tens  of  thousands  in  the  Whig  party, 
who  find  themselves  there  from  ancient  position,  whose  hearts 
throb  with  the  most  tender  desire  for  universal  emancipation, 
who  will  be  soul  sickened,  when  they  see  their  party  crouch- 
ing beneath  the  slave  power,  swimming  with  such  a  ponderous 
millstone  about  its  neck.  They  will  abandon  their  party,  we 
hope,  on  such  painful  discovery,  and  come  and  join  the  liberty 
party,  never  to  desert  it. 

Look  at  the  perfidy  of  the  treacherous  slaveholder,  who, 
after  tempting  Martin  Van  Buren  and  his  party  to  forsake 
the  great  highway  of  Democratic  principles,  to  "  bih1  and 
coo  "  in  the  forbidden  and  polluted  paths  of  slavery,  and  now, 
having  drawn  the  Democracy  out  of  sight  and  hearing  of  the 
doctrines  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  slavery  deserts 
them,  and  leaves  them  at  the  greatest  possible  remove  from 
their  own  well  avowed  principles  and  the  great  landmarks 
of  their  professions. 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDBESS.  243 

Mr.  Yan  Buren  and  his  friends  are  not  to  be  pitied  ;  they 
had  no  right  to  barter  their  principles,  their  humanity,  their 
justice,  for  power  possessed  or  expected,  when  conferred  by 
the  slaveholder  as  the  price  of  political  integrity  to  the  slave. 
The  Democracy  is  rightly  punished,  by  the  desertion  of  the 
slaveholder,  and  a  perfect  prostration  of  Mr.  Van  Buren  and 
his  party.  The  case  still  proclaims,  in  tones  loud  as  thunder, 
the  want  of  gratitude  and  the  treachery  of  the  slaveholder, 
and  shows  that  whoever  leans  upon  him  for  support,  reclines 
upon  a  "  broken  staff,  upon  whose  sharp  point  hope  bleeds 
and  expectation  dies." 

The  South  has  been  so  kind  to  the  Democrats  as  to  relieve 
them  from  standing  on  guard,  to  protect  the  jewels  of  slavery 
from  the  depredations  of  Abolitionists,  and  have  been  most 
graciously  pleased  to  permit  the  Whigs  to  cover  themselves 
with  glory  in  that  desperate  and  honorable  service ;  supposing 
that  rotation  in  office  of  such  high  distinction,  would  be  pecu- 
liarly desirable  in  this  ambitious  age ;  (and  who  could  so 
nicely  adjust  with  propriety  to  the  honorable  ambition  of 
our  times,  those  delightful  duties  which  must  be  performed 
from  one  end  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  to  another,  in  Congress 
and  out,  with  such  peculiar  judgment  and  taste  as  good,  pious, 
patriarchal  Democratic  slaveholders)  ?  The  highest  post  of 
slaveholding  elevation  wiU  be  conferred  in  all  suitable  times 
and  modes  as  befit  so  distinguished  a  service,  on  the  most 
reckless  defamers  of  Abolition,  the  equal  rights  of  men,  and 
the  Declaration  of  Independence.  The  slaveholders  will  now 
be  able  to  judge,  which  of  the  two  great  parties  can  discharge 
the  laborious  duty  of  traducing  the  slave  and  the  slave's 
friend  with  the  greatest  skill ;  which  of  the  two  parties  can 
produce  the  ablest  argument  showing  that  the  colored  man 
is  nothing  but  a  connecting  link  between  a  man  and  a  monkey, 
the  ablest  essay  proving  that  a  black  man  has  no  soul,  and  a 
mulatto  has  but  half  of  one,  and  a  man  whose  blood  is  three 


244  ALVAN   STEWART. 

quarters  of  African  descent  has  but  a  quarter.  Also,  an 
ably-written  essay  will  be  expected,  to  show  that  a  colored 
man  ought  not  to  learn  to  read  or  write  j  another  book  show- 
ing that  the  slave's  mind  and  memory  is  so  retentive  that  he 
does  not  need  a  Bible,  hymns  or  psalms  in  books,  as  he  will 
be  able  to  remember  all  he  hears  read  or  said  by  others,  in 
the  way  of  "  oral  instruction."  Another  book  will  be  required, 
showing  that  the  southern  slave  is  happier  than  the  northern 
laborer.  Another  work,  in  2  vols,,  8vo.,  showing  that  slavery 
is  a  happier  state  than  liberty,  if  a  man  has  food  to  eat  when 
well,  and  physic  to  take  when  sick.  Another  constitutional 
argument  showing  that  freemen  in  the  free  States  have  no 
business  to  petition  for  the  abolition  of  slavery  in  the  District 
of  Columbia,  or  anywhere  else ;  the  second  volume  should  be 
a  luminous  argument  supported  by  authorities  drawn  from 
history,  the  laws  of  nations,  and  Confucius,  that  a  man  had 
better  mind  his  own  business,  and  let  other  people's  alone. 
Another  powerful  book,  entitled,  "The  Authority  of  Mobs 
Vindicated  to  put  down  Abolition  ;"  finally,  there  should  be 
a  work  written,  showing  the  propriety  of  what  exists,  and 
why  a  man  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  should  have  double 
the  amount  of  political  power  of  one  north  of  the  line,  or  why 
450,000  men  south  of  the  line  should  have  as  many  electors 
of  President  as  1,000,000  north  of  that  line.  To  which  add 
a  short-hand  catechism  for  vulgar  slaveholders,  by  which  they 
may  swear  Abolition  down,  by  firing  their  oaths  at  it,  as  at  a 
mark. 

But  the  Democracy  of  this  country  have  been  taught  a 
bitter,  but  instructive  lesson.  They  should  not  have  sold 
Joseph  into  Egypt  for  a  mess  of  Presidential  pottage.  The 
Abolitionists  have  been  endeavoring  to  reduce  Democratic 
abstractions  into  substantial  realities.  We  invite  every  Demo- 
crat in  the  land  to  aid  us  in  reducing  their  beautiful  theories 
to  practice.  We  believe  every  innocent  man  upon  earth  has 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS.  245 

the  best  right  to  himself,  his  wife,  his  children,  his  earnings, 
his  labor,  his  liberty  and  life,  and  do  not  Democrats  believe 
the  same  ?  This  is  Abolition  ;  and  is  not  this  Democracy  ? 
Democrats  profess  to  be  anti-monopolists ;  what  monopoly  so 
great  as  for  250,000  slaveholders  to  monopolize  the  labor  of 
3,000,000  of  people,  without  compensation  ? 

May  our  merciful  Father  forgive  our  erring  brothers,  who 
have  gone  as  they  say,  "  for  this  once,"  and  voted  against  the 
poor  slave,  for  a  Tyler  or  a  Johnson.  May  they  be  forgiven 
by  Him  who  treasures  up  in  everlasting  remembrance  the 
sorrowful  groans  of  the  slave  mother,  as  she,  on  the  day 
they  voted  for  a  slaveholder,  listened  to  the  piteous  cry  of 
her  first-born,  beaten  by  the  fierceness  of  avarice,  the  cruelty 
of  lust,  the  unfeelingness  of  a  slave-master.  That  inarticulate 
sorrow  of  a  bleeding  heart  is  transferred  to  that  great  inefface- 
able record  which  will  be  read  and  published  from  the  centre 
of  eternity.  Oh !  forgive  all  who  have  voted  that  this 
mothei-'s  groans  and  her  child's  cry  shall  yet  for  four  years 
more  ascend  from  this  blood-stained  and  tear-watered  land, 
that  a  Tyler  may  rule.  May  the  brother  who  has  prayed 
with  us,  worked  with  us,  suffered  with  us,  petitioned  Con- 
gress for  aid  and  God  for  help,  come  back  and  vote  with  us. 
Brother !  do  not  give  that  slaveholder  more  power  to  smite 
God's  guiltless  poor !  Come  back,  brothers,  and  go  with  us, 
and  we  will  love  you.  Come  back  from  the  blood-bubbling 
feast  of  the  cruel !  Come  with  those  who  will  embrace  yon 
and  do  right.  If  you  will  go  into  this  glorious  army,  raising 
for  our  enslaved  brothers,  you  have  a  commission  sealed  with 
the  blood  of  Christ,  ready  to  be  delivered  to  you.  No  self- 
denying  and  benevolent  labor  for  the  slave  shall  be  unre- 
warded by  Him,  for  even  a  cup  of  cold  water  given  to  His 
representatives,  for  His  sake,  shall  not  be  forgotten.  Blessed 
is  he  that  considereth  the  poor.  The  Lord  shall  deliver  him 
in  time  of  trouble. 


24:6  ALVAN  STEWABT. 

Come,  Brothers,  let  us  haste  to  the  glorious  rescue  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence,  of  our  holy  religion,  our  Bibles, 
and  three  millions  of  fellow  men  in  bondage.  For  if  slavery 
is  upheld  it  must  be  by  a  perverted  Bible,  and  a  false  religion, 
and  by  some  unknown  God,  "whose  attributes  are  rage, 
revenge,  and  lust."  To  suppose,  as  the  majority  of  the 
southern  clergy  do,  that  this  hell-concocted  villainy  is  a  Bible 
institution,  approved  of  by  the  God  of  heaven  and  earth, 
would  in  twenty  years,  if  believed,  drive  all  Christendom  into 
the  arms  of  blank  atheism,  frightful  nothingness,  eternal 
sleep,  endless  chance,  which  would  be  infinitely  more  con- 
sistent than  a  slavery-approving  God.  Such  is  not  our 
God,  who  loves  all  his  children,  and  did  not  confer  power 
on  one  to  maltreat  the  other  by  making  him  his  slave.  Come 
brothers,  with  your  hearts  filled  with  courage  and  love  to 
man,  and  help  us  fight  for  hated  truth,  abused  truth,  despised 
truth.  A  lie  cannot  last  forever.  Slavery  is  the  greatest  lie 
in  the  universe  of  God.  It  is  unalloyed  wickedness.  It 
embraces  every  crime  which  may  be  committed  against  man 
or  his  Maker.  It  is  the  fittest  emblem  of  hell  that  can  be 
found  on  the  earth. 

Never  did  the  East  foretell  brighter  signs  of  coming  day. 
The  seven  years  of  persecution  are  ended.  The  nation  is 
about  to  arise  and  deliver.  We  are  on  the  eve  of  a  great 
victory  over  Gog  and  Magog.  Bone  is  hastening  to  its  bone. 
Slavery  must  die.  It  is  doomed.  The  roaring  shout  of  glad- 
dened nations  will  ascend,  as  broadside  after  broadside  of  the 
walls  of  slavery  come  thundering  to  the  ground. 

Is  not  the  day  at  hand,  when  the  apocalyptic  Babylon's 
overthrow  may  be  applied  to  American  slavery.  "And  I 
heard  another  voice  in  heaven,  saying  come  out  of  her,  my 
people,  that  ye  be  not  partakers  of  her  sins,  and  that  ye  receive 
not  of  her  plagues.  For  her  sins  have  reached  unto  heaven, 
and  God  hath  remembered  her  iniquities.  And  the  kings  of 


NATIONAL  COMMITTEE'S  ADDRESS.  247" 

the  earth  who  have  committed  fornication,  and  lived  deli- 
ciously  with  her,  shall  bewail  her  and  lament  for  her,  when 
they  shall  see  the  smoke  of  her  burning,  standing  afar  off  for 
the  fear  of  her  torment,  saying,  Alas  !  alas !  that  great  city, 
Babylon,  that  mighty  city,  for  in  one  hour  is  thy  judgment 
come.  And  the  merchants  of  the  earth  shah1  weep  and  mourn 
over  her,  for  no  man  buyeth  their  merchandise  any  more ; 
the  merchandise  of  gold  and  silver  and  precious  stones,  and 
of  pearls,  and  fine  linen,  and  purple,  and  silk,  and  scarlet,  and 
cinnamon,  and  odors,  and  ointment,  and  frankincense,  and 
wine,  and  oil,  and  fine  flour,  and  wheat,  and  beasts,  and  sheep, 
and  horses,  and  chariots,  and  SLAVES,  and  SOULS  OF  MEN." 


LETTEK  TO  SAMUEL  WEBB,  ESQ. 

10W.  October,  1342. 

DEAR  BROTHER  :  I  cannot  but  regret  that  such  a  space  of 
time  has  gone  by  since  I  held  communion  with  your  spirit, 
so  alive  to  every  great  and  good  thing.  But  I  have  been  a 
bird  of  passage  from  one  part  of  the  anti-slavery  hemisphere 
to  another.  I  have  never  so  entirely  consecrated  myself  to 
the  slave  as  I  have  done  this  year.  I  have  been  instant  in 
season  and  out  of  season ;  I  cannot  tell  you  that  my  progress 
has  been  equal  to  my  sanguine  wishes.  The  times  have  been 
put  so  horribly  out  of  joint  by  slavery  ;  money  is  so  uncom- 
monly scarce  that  our  agents  in  the  cause  could  scarcely  keep 
their  noses  out  of  water,  and  have  lain  at  the  edge  of  the 
water  in  a  sort  of  snorting  and  strangling  state,  and  I  would 
be  obliged  to  pass  to  their  part  of  the  country  and  pump  the 
water  out  of  them,  and  lay  on  warm  clothes,  and  beg  for  a 
sort  of  mineral  air  to  inflate  their  lungs  with,  and  then  they 
would  rise  and  run  again  as  though  nothing  had  happened  to 
them. 

Slavery  has  undone  us.  She  has  crawled  into  the  Consti- 
tution ;  has  paralyzed  the  Church ;  broken  the  compact ; 
silenced  petition ;  overthrown  morality ;  blotted  out  human- 
ity ;  really  dissolved  the  Confederacy,  and  left  the  nation 
undone.  I  have  attended  a  vast  number  of  conventions  this 
summer  all  over  the  land,  and  placed  in  all  its  astounding 
forms  the  modes  by  which  slave  labor  manifests  its  malignity 
to  free  labor ;  by  which  the  Clay  and  Calhoun  Compromise 
Act  has  alone  wrung  and  crushed  out  of  existence  one  thou- 
sand millions  of  dollars  in  the  North,  and  reduced  us  to  a 
position  of  misery  from  which  twenty  years  of  unbroken  pros- 


LETTER   TO   SAMUEL  WEBB.  24:9 

perity  could  not  lift  us  up  to  that  summit-level  we  occupied 
in  1833.  The  people  approvingly  admit  that  all  I  say  is  true, 
and  admit  that  we  only  perpetuate  our  wretchedness  and 
misery  by  electing  either  of  these  slaveholders,  Clay  and 
Calhoun,  to  the  Presidency ;  men  who,  by  being  fathers  of 
the' Compromise  Act  of  1833,  thereby  thrust  their  bowie- 
knives  into  the  national  heart  from  opposite  sides,  where 
they  met  and  struck  fire  in  the  conflict  of  opposition,  until 
the  points  of  their  blades  each  pricked  through  from  opposite 
sides,  and  for  that  act,  each  claims  the  Presidency,  and 
each  is  equally  entitled  to  rule  a  slave-loving  and  a  slave- 
ridden  people.  I  say  men  will  listen  and  hear  the  proofs  I 
bring  that  these  two  men  are  the  great  destroyers  of  their 
country's  glory  and  happiness.  Yes,  and  men  will  admit  it 
is  all  so,  and  then  go  away  and  join  their  parties'  shout  for 
the  one,  or  hurrah  for  the  other  !  What  destiny  awaits  this 
wicked  land !  I  solemnly  believe  there  is  more  positive 
crime  committed  against  God  in  wronging  man,  in  this  Re- 
public every  day,  than  in  the  sixteen  governments  of  conti- 
nental Europe,  with  their  two  hundred  and  twenty-four  mil- 
lions of  inhabitants.  If  the  sun  went  around  the  earth  as  the 
ancients  supposed,  I  think  he  would  pause  with  amazement 
in  his  diurnal  career  over  JBrazily  Cuba,  and  the  United 
States.  But  I  mean  to  do  what  I  can,  in  my  little  day  and 
generation,  to  crush  this  great  monster,  though  I  confess  I 
tremble  for  my  country.  Our  election  is  the  8th  of  Novem- 
ber, I  hope  we  may  gain  some  over  last  year.  If  we  could 
go  as  high  as  seven  thousand  votes,  I  confess  I  should  feel 
we  had  done  nobly.  But  I  fear  we  shall  not,  though  I  have 
worked  so  hard. 

Allow  me  to  hear  from  you  soon,  and  believe  me  as  ever, 
your  assured  friend. 


11* 


LETTER  TO  DR.  BAILEY. 

April,  1842. 

DR.  BAILEY,  EDITOR  OF  THE  "  PHILANTHROPIST  :" 

SIB  :  Pardon  the  freedom  of  a  stranger,  in  bringing  be- 
fore you  the  sentiments  of  a  cooperative  in  the  great  field  of 
human  rights.  Perhaps  by  comparing  opinions  more  fre- 
quently, on  the  subject  of  American  slavery  and  its  remedy, 
we  may  find  that  those  who  are  separated  by  many  degrees 
of  latitude  and  longitude,  may  view  this  great  crime  and  its 
cure  not  essentially  unlike.  That  which  is  the  oftenest  con- 
sidered, will  be  the  best  understood,  and  what  is  intended  to 
be  embraced  in  the  great  issue  now  making  up  between 
liberty  and  slavery,  is  a  question  in  which  the  character  of 
this  nation  is  deeply  involved,  and  on  which  the  happiness  of 
tens  of  thousands  and  the  freedom  of  millions  may  depend  ; 
and  must  be  one  always  claiming  and  summoning  to  its  con- 
sideration, the  most  patriotic  and  far-seeing  of  her  sons.  If 
this  communication  should  be  the  means  of  your  placing  your 
views  before  the  world  on  the  momentous  question  alluded  to 
by  me,  one  of  the  greatest  objects  of  this  letter  will  have  been 
accomplished. 

The  work  of  the  Revolution  was  fairly  staked  out,  em- 
bracing the  political  freedom  of  the  colonies — the  personal 
liberty  of  each  one— in  the  immortal  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence : — but  that  great  work  was  but  half  completed. 

The  great  Declaration  is  a  summary  of  colonial  and  personal 
injustice.  The  sword  in  seven  years  cut  loose  the  colonies 
from  their  bondage.  The  dismemberment  was  ratified.  Our 
country  took  her  seat  at  the  council  board  of  nations.  The 

250 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  251 

young  Sovereignty  limped  up  into  the  temple  of  nations,  with 
the  Declaration  of  Independence  spread,  in  her  right  hand, 
with  a  whip  and  fetter  in  her  left,  followed  by  a  slave,  while 
the  blush  mantled  on  her  cheek,  and  revealed  the  struggles 
of  her  shame;  and  what  she  lacked  in  the  sincerity  of  intent, 
she  contrived  to  countervail  by  a  certain  impudence  of  pre- 
tence— and  what  she  lost  by  force  of  position,  she  would  fain 
make  up,  by  the  ingenuity  of  her  abstractions.  Theoretically, 
the  relation  of  slave  and  master,  king  and  people,  was  dis- 
solved. The  Declaration  of  Independence  struck  up,  and  the 
hand  of  the  king  fell  off;  it  struck  down,  and  the  hand  of 
the  master  was  unclenched.  Slavery  since  then  has  been 
constitutional  man-stealing  and  legal  kidnapping;  slavery, 
though  once  laid  out  for  interment,  was  not  buried,  but  was 
in  fact,  an  ill-omened  resuscitation  of  a  fungus  on  the  body 
politic  and  was  strapped  and  bandaged  up  with  the  other 
sores  of  the  Revolution,  and  instead  of  excision,  it  now  claims 
the  dignity  of  being  a  "  peculiar  institution,"  whose  increas- 
ing weight  makes  the  body  politic,  by  which  it  is  nursed,  reel 
and  stagger  under  its  ponderous  load.  The  past  year  has 
given  some  encouraging  premonitory  symptoms  of  that  final 
and  frightful  collapse  of  a  system  of  crime,  which  has  battened 
on  the  tears  and  blood  of  men,  from  century  to  century. 

Great  injustice  will  not  last  forever.  Accumulated  sorrows 
of  swelling  hearts,  will  burst  out  somewhere.  In  a  single  morn- 
ing of  August,  1831,  eighty-four  disembodied  spirits  were 
summoned  from  the  Southampton  massacre,  to  stand  before 
the  Eternal,  as  witnesses  of  justice  long  denied,  and  hope 
crushed  in  the  bosom  of  the  slave.  Were  the  green  earth  of 
this  nation  carpeted  with  Decalogues  beaming  with  celestial 
light  from  every  word ;  were  the  blue  heavens  of  this  land 
curtained  with  aphorisms  of  eternal  truth,  and  the  leaf  of 
every  tree  in  the  forest,  or  the  field,  instinct  with  declarations 
of  the  equality  and  universal  liberty  conferred  by  God  on 


252  ALVAN   STKWAKT. 

man,  still  one  guiltless  slave  held  as  a  chattel,  by  the  law,  would 
give  the  lie  direct,  to  this  festooned  and  emblazoned  hypoc- 
risy of  high  sounding  moral  assertion.  The  abstractions  of 
this  nation  are  divine  ethics,  but  the  practice  iniquity's  rules 
of  action.  It  seems  to  be  thought  important  that  a  man's 
abstract  belief  be  right ;  then  his  practice  is  his  own  affair, 
for  which  he  is  not  accountable. 

It  is  difficult  to  define  the  position  of  a  nation  whose 
morality  terminates  in  the  orthodoxy  of  its  abstractions.  No 
nation  in  which  the  religion  of  Moses  and  Christ  prevails,  was 
ever  rich  enough  to  perform  its  labor  by  slaves.  Slavery 
will  cost  a  nation  its  self-respect,  also  the  loss  of  the  labor  of 
those  who  rely  on  slavery  for  support,  also  the  loss  of  the 
poor  freeman's  labor,  who  will  not  work  where  labor  is  dis- 
graced as  the  business  of  slaves.  Slavery  will  bankrupt  its 
community  every  ten  years,  because  slavery  will  no*  and  can- 
not do  enough  to  maintain  a  community,  where  the  majoiity 
are  idle.  The  deficit  which  slavery  does  not  supply,  must  be 
purloined  by  stealthy  credit,  and  paid  in  repudiation  and 
bankruptcy.  Slavery  blots  out  the  line  between  mine  and 
thine,  and  elevates  the  greatest  crime  into  a  "  peculiar  insti- 
tution." 

The  commerce  of  such  a  country  is  quickened  into  life  by 
the  whip ;  the  groans  of  fathers,  the  tears  of  mothers,  are  the 
indications  of  its  progress. 

The  cracking  lash  from  twice  ten  thousand  cotton-fields,  is 
the  mournful  music  of  their  progress  from  day  to  day,  to  life's 
end.  The  slaveholder  cramps  the  immortal  powers  of  his 
slave,  to  make  the  animal  portion  more  available.  I  repeat, 
no  nation  is  rich  enough  to  use  immortal  man  as  property. 
He  is  too  valuable  for  the  base  purposes  to  which  he  is 
applied.  What  farmer  could  prosperously  till  his  cornfield 
with  a  golden  plough,  with  handles  of  orient  pearl  ?  It  maybe 
asked,  if  slavery  expired  on  the  4th  of  July,  1776,  how  has 


LETTER   TO   DK.    BAILEY.  253 

it  come  down  to  us,  with  so  much  brass  on  its  front,  claiming 
the  assistance  of  the  Constitution  as  its  great  patron  ?  The 
answer  is,  there  was  no  days-man,  no  saviour,  no  Granville 
Sharpe,  to  stand  up  between  the  oppressor  with  power  and 
the  helpless  oppressed.  Had  God  seen  fit  to  have  raised  a 
Sharpe  to  have  proclaimed  that  slaves  could  not  breathe  in 
these  United  States,  the  first  moment  they  touched  our  soil,  the 
abiding  electricity  of  the  great  Declaration  might  have  melted 
their  chains ;  there  was  a  divinity  in  its  language,  and  a  force 
in  its  terms,  that  casuistry  could  not  resist  or  robbery  pre- 
vent. 

Lord  Mansfield,  who,  for  more  than  30  years,  ruled  the 
judicial  mind  of  Westminster  Hall,  by  the  supremacy  of  his 
own,  twice  in  the  King's  Bench,  on  solemn  argument,  pro- 
nounced slavery  a  part  of  the  law  of  England.  But  the  great 
Granville  Sharpe  consecrated  himself  to  the  noble  work  of 
exploring  the  deepest  spring  of  English  liberty,  the  waters  of 
whose  fountain  when  by  Sharpe  presented  to  this  same  court, 
Lord  Mansfield  declared  to  be  the  true  nectar  of  English 
liberty,  and  from  that  day  henceforth  forever,  no  slave  could 
breathe  who  had  placed  his  feet  on  the  soil  of  beetle-cliffed 
England.  That  was  the  eau  de  vie,  the  water  of  life ;  and 
Somerset's  case  will  be  regarded  to  the  world's  end,  as  the 
re-discovery  of  the  long-lost  spring  of  English  liberty.  If  we 
had  had  a  Sharpe  to  have  taken  a  slave,  on  a  writ  of  habeas 
corpus,  before  the  first  Chief  Justice  Jay  of  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States  in  1789  or  1790,  while  the  great 
truths  were  yet  in  the  memory  of  men,  while  gratitude  to 
God  was  felt  for  the  white  man's  deliverance  from  a  foreign 
yoke,  before  the  cotton  gin — the  black  man's  curse — was 
invented,  who  can  tell  but  what  the  slave  might  have  been 
proclaimed  free  ! 

But  alas  !  the  claimants  of  human  flesh  were  constitution- 
makers,  law-givers,  law-interpreters,  and  law-executioners. 


254  ALVAN   STEWAET. 

Construction  and  definition  came  mainly,  from  those  inte- 
rested to  perpetuate  a  crime,  as  disastrous,  in  the  end,  to 
themselves  and  their  posterity,  as  to  the  victims  of  this 
aggravated  villainy.  Slavery  has  eaten  out  the  very  soul  of 
words,  and  every  intendment  raised,  in  behalf  of  liberty,  and 
every  presumption  raised  against  cruelty  and  injustice  is 
broken  down,  by  violent  construction,  shamefully  at  war  with 
the  benignity  of  the  common  law.  The  common  law  pre- 
sumes all  men  free,  till  the  contrary  appears,  without  regard 
to  color.  Slavery  presumes  a  colored  man  a  slave,  until  he 
proves  himself  free.  I  solemnly  believe  if  the  Constitution 
wrere  to  be  interpreted  by  the  judges  of  Westminster  Hall, 
slavery  would  cease  in  a  single  day  in  the  District  of  Colum- 
bia ;  and  it  would  be  told,  it  could  not  derive  a  single  power 
to  hold  a  colored  man  by  virtue  of  that  instrument. 

Has  there  ever  been  a  judge  at  Washington,  who  delivered 
a  judicial  opinion,  in  which  the  rights  of  the  slave  were 
involved,  but  came  to  the  consideration  of  the  question, 
under  the  horrible  weight  of  injustice,  so  deep,  that  the 
loftiest  intellect  might  flag  and  falter,  by  the  debasement  of 
its  employment,  which  instead  of  weighing  out  the  justice  of 
Heaven,  is  basely  employed  in  lending  its  sanction  to  the 
clutchings  of  robbery,  the  greediness  of  injustice,  and  the 
baseness  of  avarice.  Look  at  the  pompous  prowling  white 
man,  and  the  poor  powerless  black  one,  contesting  their 
rights  in  a  slaveholding  forum  !  Could  the  black  man  have 
summoned  as  much  influence  and  power  as  the  white,  and 
employed  able  counsel  to  vindicate  his  rights,  what  glorious 
triumphs  would  truth  and  liberty  have  made  over  falsehood 
and  tyranny ;  the  world  would  have  rung  with  the  grandest 
efforts  of  mind  which  had  ever  arrested  the  attention  of  man- 
kind, from  the  time  of  Demosthenes  to  the  days  of  Cicero  ; 
from  Paul  to  Luther,  or  from  Bacon  and  Raleigh  to  Edmund 
Burke  and  Patrick  Henry. 


LETTER   TO   DE.    BAILEY.  255 

But  no,  the  colored  man's  oath  could  never  be  heard  in  the 
Sanctuary  of  Justice,  for  wrong  done  him  by  one  of  the 
Caucasian  race.  He  was  poor,  he  could  employ  no  counsel 
to  aid  by  strong  arguments  to  drive  deep  the  stakes  of 
liberty.  In  the  last  half  century,  there  have  been  wrongs 
enough  inflicted  by  the  white  upon  the  colored  race,  to  have 
kept  all  the  courts  of  the  civilized  world  well  employed,  in 
administering  and  weighing  out  natural  justice  to  these 
injured  ones. 

"We  therefore,  as  Abolitionists,  should  never  make  a  single 
admission,  in  relation  to  the  construction  of  our  Constitution, 
which  might  tell  against  the  slave.  It  is  craven  to  admit  any- 
thing against  the  colored  man,  in  favor  of  piratical  legislation. 
Every  act,  organic  or  legislative,  morally,  so  far  as  it  bears 
on  the  slave,  is  clearly  null  and  void  in  the  court  of  con- 
science, it  being  made  to  take  rights  from  him,  without  his 
consent,  and  which  natural  justice  would  declare  wrong.  It 
is  ethically  wrong  to  admit  that  the  slaveholder  has  one  right, 
however  acquired,  when  that  right  is  carved  out  of  the  natu- 
ral ones  of  the  slave,  no  matter  how  strongly  the  slaveholder's 
right  may  be  upheld  by  a  covenant  or  league  on  the  part  of 
the  free  States.  For  neither  the  slave  or  free  States  had  any 
moral  jurisdiction  over  the  African,  to  reduce  the  quantum 
of  his  political  and  personal  rights,  below  the  average  of  the 
great  community.  But  when  we  point  to  the  Constitution  or 
laws  of  the  Union  or  States,  as  evidence  of  rights  secured  to 
the  master,  to  the  disparagement  of  the  slave,  whose  whole 
life,  and  that  of  his  race,  have  been  a  continued  protest 
against  and  dissent  therefrom,  our  act  is  morally  preposterous 
in  the  extreme. 

No  doubt  many  tender  consciences  suppose  there  is  some- 
thing perversely  radical  in  the  above  proposition,  and  that 
such  doctrine  is  dangerously  immoral ;  and  these  persons 
seem,  although  subject  to  an  abolition  influence,  anxious  to 


256  ALVAN    STEWART. 

atone  for  their  small  spice  of  abolition,  by  asserting  the  vali- 
dity of  the  master's  claim,  whatever  it  may  be,  when  propped 
by  constitutions,  legislation,  or  judicial  decisions.  This  looks 
too  much  like  being  as  liberal  as  a  prince  in  another  man's 
house. 

The  ground  I  take,  is,  that  all  slave  laws  being  made  in 
derogation  of  all  right,  human  or  divine,  and  by  the  robber 
against  the  robbed,  of  the  strong  against  the  weak,  and  with- 
out consideration  or  consent  express  or  implied,  on  the  part 
of  the  slave,  and  for  the  entire  profit  and  advantage  of  the 
master,  and  to  the  never-ending  injury  of  the  slave,  therefore 
it  seems  to  me,  that  the  facts  here  assumed  as  entering  into 
any  law  to  uphold  slavery,  directly  or  remote,  are  of  them- 
selves evidence  of  the  most  stupendous  fraud  which  can  be 
committed  through  the  instrumentality  of  one  class  of  men 
upon  another.  Then  we  may  refer  to  the  civil  law,  the  law  of 
nations,  the  common  law  ;  and  it  is  the  unbroken  current  or 
authority  of  all  these  laws  that  fraud  avoids  all  contracts  and 
all  proceedings  however  solemn,  as  a  judgment,  or  decree  of 
the  highest  courts ;  and  even  acts  of  parliament  when  pro- 
cured by  fraud,  are  all  null  and  void,  however  high  the 
authentication  of  their  solemnities.  But  slavery,  so  far  as  writ- 
ten laws  come  to  its  support,  is  always  stamped  with  fraud, 
as  clearly  as  though  in  the  preamble  to  the  law  it  was  to 
recite,  that  "  Whereas,  it  is  right  for  the  strong  to  rob  the 
weak,  the  powerful  to  deprive  the  helpless  of  themselves,  and 
appropriate  them  and  their  posterity  to  their  own  use  ;  and 
whereas  morality  and  honesty  in  the  transactions  of  men  are 
exploded  truisms  belonging  to  an  obselete  age,  and  the  man, 
who  by  night  or  day,  or  by  the  most  flagitious  fraud  can 
circumvent  this  fellow-being,  is  well  entitled  to  the  fruits  of 
his  knavery ;  therefore  be  it  enacted,  that  if  A  is  stronger 
than  B,  he  has  a  better  right  to  B's  body  than  B  has  to  him- 
self; if  A  by  fraud,  stratagem,  or  force  can  violate  B's  natural 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  257 

right,  that  is  to  be  taken  as  evidence  that  B  was  not  made 
for  himself,  but  for  his  stronger  neighbor's  use." 

Again,  is  it  not  the  essence  of  absurdity,  for  us  to  contend 
that  the  constituted  powers  of  this  nation  are  constitutionally 
capable  of  being  employed  to  uphold  slavery,  but  these  same 
constituted  authorities  are  constitutionally  powerless  to  do 
justice  to  the  slave,  and  restore  him  to  his  liberty  ? 

We  never  should  admit  that  we  are  under  a  moral  obliga- 
tion to  do  wrong,  and  have  therefore  no  legal  power  to  do 
right.  Many  are  in  haste  to  admit  we  have  conspired  by 
compact  against  the  liberties  of  the  colored  man,  and  that 
morality  requires  we  should  be  pertinaciously  and  wickedly 
consistent  in  carrying  out  the  original  knavery  of  our  contract, 
to  crush  forever  the  rights  of  two  and  a  half  millions  of  men, 
and  that  we  exhausted  our  power  to  do  good,  in  the  great 
evil  we  undertook  to  perform  ;  therefore,  if  indeed  we  desired 
now  to  do  right,  we  have  no  power ;  or  at  any  rate,  morality 
demands  we  should  be  villains,  because  we  so  agreed,  rather 
than  become  just  and  honest  men,  at  the  expense  of 
breaking  a  murderous  covenant.  We  have  thrust  the  inno- 
cent man  into  the  dungeon,  but  have  no  power,  say  some,  to 
lift  him  out.  Our  constitutional  power  being  exercised  to 
destroy  the  rights  of  man,  is  a  spent  power,  and  when  a  sense 
of  our  crime  appears  to  us,  and  we  would  desire  to  redress 
the  wrong  we  have  done,  some  tell  us,  alas !  we  have  no  space 
for  repentance,  because  we  are  constitutionally  moral  bank- 
"rupts.  Every  admission  made  of  constitutional  inability  to 
redress  any  and  every  act  of  injustice,  direct  or  remote, 
affecting  the  liberties  of  any  of  our  countrymen,  touching 
any  point  wherein  we  have  heretofore  wronged  them,  is  as 
cowardly  as  it  is  untrue.  It  has,  however,  often  been  done  to 
propitiate  slaveholding  and  pro-slavery  wrath  ;  but  we  have 
always  lost  in  self-respect,  more  than  we  have  gained,  by  our 
pusillanimity.  It  is  wrong  to  make  merchandise  of  even  a 


258  ALVAN    STEWAST. 

legal  opinion  which  goes  to  confirm  the  conquests  of  the 
bueaneer.  The  proposition  cannot  be  doubted  that  we  have 
power  to  take  back  everything  wrong  in  the  Constitution  or 
law,  to  which  we  or  our  fathers  have  lent  their  sanction, 
affecting  the  rights  of  colored  men.  We  can  abolish  slavery 
in  the  District  of  Columbia  and  between  the  slave  States, 
because  these  two  kinds  of  slavery  derive  their  power  from 
the  Constitution,  whether  rightfully  or  wrongfully  I  will  not 
stop  to  inquire.  The  fugitive  slave  act  of  1793,  by  which 
the  free  States  have  become  the  hunter's  great  forest  of 
human  game,  can  be  abolished  by  Congress.  The  internal 
slave  trade,  and  the  act  of  1793,  abolished,  slavery  could  not 
stand  five  years.  Then  there  is  the  war  power  of  Congress, 
the  treaty  power,  and  the  guaranty  in  the  Constitution  of  a 
republican  form  of  government  to  each  State ;  who  dare 
affirm  or  deny  that  some  of  these  powers  may  be  equal  to  the 
abolition  of  slavery  in  all  of  the  States  ? 

"Without  pausing  to  reason  for  a  moment,  on  any  of 
these  remedies,  I  may  be  permitted  to  say  no  reasonable 
Abolitionist  should  ever  suffer  his  mind  to  be  perplexed  for 
a  moment  with  the  notion  that  we  have  not  power  to  undo 
all  the  wrong  which  we  have  inflicted  on  the  slave.  The  bare 
discharge  of  the  free  States  in  money  and  men  from  all  obli- 
gation to  aid  in  suppressing  slave  insurrections  and  to  deliver 
up  fugitives,  would  compel  the  South  to  manumit  for  their 
own  safety.  The  South,  were  they  to  rely  on  themselves  for 
protection  from  insurrection,  would  be  compelled  to  dot  its 
whole  territory  with  forts;  not  less  than  2,000  would  be 
required,  to  protect  the  women  and  children.  The  forts 
required,  at  $20,000  each  would  be  $40,000,000,  and  the 
munitions,  arms,  etc.,  to  furnish  in  a  small  degree  each  fort, 
could  not  be  less  than  $10,000  each,  or  $20,000,000  more, 
which  added  to  the  cost  efforts  would  amount  to  $60,000,000 
-—strange  mode  of  extorting  labor  in  the  nineteenth  century  ! 


LETTER   TO   DR.   BAILEY.  259 

Secretary  Upshur  refers  to  this  mode  of  defending  the  South 
in  his  late  report.  If  the  forts  were  built,  the  slaves  would 
find  them  as  good  points  to  rally  for  insurrection,  as  the 
master  for  protection. 

Again,  the  great  staple  of  the  South,  cotton,  has  found  a 
competition  in  the  British  East  Indies,  where  enough  pro- 
bably will  be  grown  in  a  few  years  to  supply  the  necessities 
of  men,  at  about  half  the  price  at  which  cotton  has  heretofore 
been  sold.  To  enable  the  southern  planter  with  his  reckless 
mode  of  conducting  his  affairs,  to  compete  successfully 
against  the  cheap  free  labor  of  India,  would  require  cotton- 
gin  and  slaves  to  be  given  to  him,  as  a  governmental  bounty, 
or  donation,  in  the  start. 

The  first  streak  of  light  which  appeared  after  the  Revolu- 
tion was  a  lurid  one,  shot  forth  some  twenty-six  years  since  ; 
and  men  have  disputed  from  that  time  to  this,  whether  it 
was  a  prismatic  ray  of  the  ascending  glories  of  the  sun  of 
liberty,  or  whether  it  was  not  a  false  light  flung  up  from 
the  pent  fires  of  slavery.  It  is  called  the  Colonization  So- 
ciety. A  few  good  men  in  the  North  had  a  hazy,  indistinct 
idea  of  the  immeasurable  wrongs  of  slavery,  and  could  find 
no  measures  for  its  redress,  except  expatriation  beyond  the 
Atlantic,  of  those  freedmen,  who  had  once  been  its  victims. 
The  North  thought  they  saw  in  this  society  the  colored  man 
elevated  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe,  and  the  slaveholders 
saw  something  moi*e  congenial ;  they  saw  the  freedman,  by 
them  hated,  because  he  was  free,  cut  off  from  all  sympathy 
with  the  slave,  no  more  to  be  the  bondman's  eyes  and  feet, 
the  slave  made  safe,  his  value  increased,  his  escape  impos- 
sible. This  society  was  a  strange  confusion  of  benevolence 
and  fraud,  of  northern  indefiniteness  and  southern  avarice, 
glossed  with  good  intentions,  controlled  by  southern  saga- 
city, as  heartless  as  it  was  specifically  selfish,  believing  in  the 


260  ALVAN   STEWAET. 

safety-valve  for  troubled  consciences,  and  a  sure  way  to  maka 
slavery  valuable  and  perpetual. 

About  this  time,  or  shortly  after,  the  slaves,  it  is  supposed, 
organized  two  distinct  missions,  one  the  free  State,  and  the 
other  the  Canada  mission.  The  object  of  these  missions 
appears  to  have  been  to  send  off  slaves  to  liberty.  These 
societies,  without  funds  or  agents,  or  the  countenance  of  a 
single  member  of  Congress,  or  a  doctor  of  divinity  (but  the 
whole  constituted  authorities  of  this  country,  by  sea  and 
land,  armed  against  them),  have  done  a  very  spirited  and 
successful  business  (although  the  slave  trade  is  forbidden)  / 
the  society  deals  in  nothing  but  slaves,  and  has  sent  away  to 
these  missions  five  persons,  where  the  Colonization  Society 
has  sent  one  to  Africa.  The  Colonization  Society  seems  to 
be  a  sponge,  to  absorb  the  unregarded  and  floating  sym- 
pathy, which  men  feel,  to  do  something  to  wash  out  the  vile- 
ness  of  slavery.  When  men  cease  to  delude  themselves  with 
the  folly  that  the  expatriation  of  a  few  thousand  freedmen,  is 
the  same  as  the  emancipation  of  two  and  a  half  millions  of 
slaves,  then,  and  not  till  then,  will  the  Colonization  Society 
be  powerless,  for  the  purpose  of  mischief. 

Long  continued  injustice  done  to  man,  must  burst  up  some- 
where, sooner  or  later.  Witness  the  Southampton  massacre. 
Slavery  did  it.  Slave  insurrections  on  sea  or  land  with  mur- 
der, is  a  part  of  the  shocking  system.  In  1 832,  a  few  northern 
noble  spirits,  deeply  pitying  the  condition  of  the  slave,  and  per- 
ceiving the  hopelessness  of  colonization,  determined  that  the 
only  remedy  for  slavery  was  unconditional  emancipation.  And 
in  the  last  ten  years  there  has  been  performed  an  amount  of 
labor  by  the  Anti-Slavery  Reformers,  without  a  parallel  in 
any  of  the  past  ages  of  benevolence  in  the  world. 

Both  of  the  great  parties  who  contended  for  the  mastery 
of  the  Republic  hoped  to  flatter  the  South  by  a  base  and  pro- 


LETTER   TO   DE.    BAILET.  261 

found  acknowledgment  of  various  Constitutional  compacts 
implie  1,  upholding  slavery,  which  never  existed,  and  by 
abusing  Abolitionists  without  stint  or  measure — this  was  the 
competition  between  these  great  parties,  who  from  that  day 
to  this  have  poured  from  a  thousand  presses  concocted  and 
deliberate  falsehoods,  to  bereave  the  friends  of  man  of  their 
characters  for  humanity,  sense,  patriotism,  and  every  quality 
which  can  elevate  or  ennoble.  These  parties  have  set  mob- 
ferociousness  upon  us,  demolished  private  buildings,  destroyed 
the  sanctuaries  of  the  living  God,  and  devoted  to  the  flames 
the  most  beautiful  temple  ever  erected  to  Liberty  on  this 
continent ;  they  laid  their  Vandal  hands  upon  printing  presses 
and  destroyed  them ;  and  above  all,  they  inflicted  dreadful 
scourging  upon  our  most  worthy  men  ;  they  levied  fines  con- 
trary to  law  on  some,  imprisoned  others,  and  finally  murdered 
Lovejoy,  the  martyr. 

We  were  compelled,  poor  and  sparse  as  we  were,  to  erect 
and  maintain  presses,  papers,  and  publish  books,  pamphlets, 
reviews,  magazines,  and  in  fact  to  create  in  serf-defence,  and 
that  of  the  rights  of  our  race,  a  literature  of  our  own,  in 
which  to  embalm  the  sorrows  of  insulted  men.  We  have 
been  refused  the  columns  of  papers  to  refute  the  vilest  calum- 
nies which  those  same  papers  had  originated  or  circulated. 
The  public  mind  was  so  far  misled,  as  to  the  objects  of  Aboli- 
tionists, as  to  believe  slaveholders  to  be  the  innocent  victims 
of  position,  and  that  Abolitionists  were  justly  deprived  of 
trials  by  jury,  as  monsters  too  great  to  be  entitled  to  any- 
thing but  the  headlong  vengeance  of  lynch  law. 

The  Abolitionists  of  the  United  States,  on  bended  knees, 
besought  the  great  denominational  divisions  of  the  church  to 
throw  open  the  doors  of  their  clnirches,  and  view  the  poor 
slave  as  the  representative  of  their  ascended  Redeemer. 
This  great  honor  we  tendered  them  in  the  imploring  bowels 
of  compassion,  and  in  every  form  of  entreaty,  argument  and 


262  •  .ALVAN   STEWART. 

remonstrance.  These  churches  have  been  besought  to  tell  their 
brethren  of  the  same  sect  or  connection  in  the  South,  that 
slavery  was  a  sin  against  God,  a  crime  against  man  ;  and  to  let 
the  oppressed  go  free.  But  these  churches  refused  to  admo- 
nish and  do  the  glorious  work,  and  preferred  union  in  iniquity 
to  schism  for  the  love  of  God  and  man.  Had  the  church,  as 
her  character  imports,  opened  her  arms  for  the  pleading  and 
bleeding  slave,  long  ere  this,  it  is  believed,  the  work  of  eman- 
cipation would  have  been  complete ;  and  political  action  by 
a  liberty  party  rendered  unnecessary.  But  she  declined  the 
Heaven-descended  honor ;  she  refused  in  most  cases  to  hear  a 
message  from  him  just  ready  to  perish,  or  give  notice  of  the 
meetings  in  which  to  listen  to  the  tales  of  his  long  unheeded 
sorrows. 

We  then  besought  the  authorities  of  our  national  capitol 
with  uncounted  petitions  asking  Congress  to  exercise  the 
constitutional  power  it  possessed  to  break  the  slave's  yoke. 
When  the  frank  and  fearless  petition  of  the  slave's  friend  was 
read  in  Congress,  the  slaveholding  representatives  sent  up  a 
shriek  which  pierced  the  capitol  dome,  and  for  about  the 
space  of  two  hours,  they  cried  out  "  Great  is  Diana  of  the 
Ephesians !" 

Two  hours  did  I  say  ?  Have  they  not  so  cried  from  that  day 
to  this,  in  behalf  of  slavery  ?  Have  they  not  walked  over  the 
prostrate  Constitution  of  their  country  ?  Have  they  not, 
unread,  unprinted,  unreferred  and  unconsidered,  sent  petitions 
signed  by  more  than  two  millions  of  our  citizens  to  the  Con- 
gressional sepulchre?  Have  not  the  most  solemn  appeals, 
for  the  last  eight  years,  praying  the  emancipation  of  thousands 
of  our  native-born  citizens  from  slavery  the  most  awful,  been 
treated  with  an  indignity  surpassed  only  by  a  fanaticism 
which  could  break  down  the  barriers  of  the  Constitution  to 
strike  down  the  imploring  slave ;  in  the  first  moment  of  his 
trembling  hope,  when  the  first  ray  of  light  feU  upon  his 


LETTER   TO   DK.    BAILEY.  263 

chains,  it  was  to  be  extinguished  by  a  darkness  which  cast 
its  common  shadow  over  the  Anglo-Saxon's  constitutional 
hope,  and  the  poor  African's  only  expectation. 

But  this  entombment  of  a  nation's  recorded  philanthropy 
is  not  a  final  rest ;  it  shall  have  a  resurrection  with  the  flush 
of  injured  immortality  on  its  cheek,  defying  her  assassins  ; 
and  shall  publish  the  glory  of  her  redemption,  where  there  ia 
a  slave  to  be  set  free,  or  a  freeman  to  rejoice. 

We  have  appealed  to  the  church,  and  she  has  declined  the 
honor.  "We  appealed  to  Congress,  and  she  threw  us  back 
our  petitions,  mixed  with  the  broken  fragments  of  the  Con- 
stitution. We  have  appealed  to  the  slaveholder ;  he  points  to 
the  fagot  and  the  flames.  What  shall  we  do  ? 

The  nation  is  about  to  become  all  slaves  or  freemen 
together.  The  thirteen  slave  States  have  found  slavery  too 
expensive  a  mode  of  existence  without  practising,  at  least  de- 
cennially, on  mankind,  that  robbery,  through  bankruptcy  and 
repudiation,  which  they  continually  inflict  upon  their  slaves. 
These  slave  States  are  insolvent ;  showing  their  deformity 
abroad,  and  revealing  their  nakedness  at  home. 

They  have  struck  down  by  tariff  legislation  that  prosperity 
in  the  North,  which  they  had  neither  the  power  to  imitate, 
nor  the  firmness  to  pursue. 

The  North,  by  its  wretched  alliance,  through  its  Siamese 
ligature,  walks  with  a  feeble  step  ;  as  it  carries  helplessness 
along,  it  is  itself  borne  to  the  same  miserable  end. 

The  nation  is  rushing  upon  the  crisis  of  her  destiny  with  a 
momentum  augmenting  the  velocity  of  her  speed,  proportioned 
to  the  increasing  light  of  her  criminality.  For  already  the 
man  of  Vermont  and  the  citizen  of  Michigan  hear  in  the  sigh  of 
the  south  wind  the  cry  of  the  South,  saying,  "  Cease  to  prevent 
ray  escape ;  cease  to  oppose  my  insurrections  for  that  liberty 
for  which  your  fathers  fought  and  bled  ;  cease  to  provide  the 
southern  fort  and  arsenal,  by  your  taxes,  to  keep  us  down ; 


264  ALVAN   STEWART. 

vote  me  free;  remember  me  at  the  ballot-box,  where  you 
stand  one  of  the  sovereigns  of  this  empire  of  slaves ;  you 
have  the  power — God  give  you  the  will !" 

Congress,  by  means  of  slaveholding  bullies,  has  lost  its  cha- 
racter as  a  deliberative  body ;  it  is  the  national  bear-garden ; 
a  more  licentious  b^dy  than  the  French  Constituent  Assembly 
when  torn  by  Girondist  and  Mountain  factions ;  for  those 
murdered  their  sovereign;  these,  our  Constitution  and  the 
nation's  character. 

Slavery  has  ruled  this  land.  The  robbed  Cherokee  has 
been  driven  from  the  council-fires  and  graves  of  his  fore- 
fathers, by  the  slaveholding  bayonet,  to  find  a  new  home  in 
the  land  of  the  setting  sun,  and  leavesbehind,  the  legacy  of  a 
wronged  and  ruined  people's  curse  ;  and  as  band  after  band 
of  the  brave  Seminoles  are  forced  from  their  everglades  to 
the  solitudes  of  the  distant  West,  we  may  well  fear  the 
seven  last  plagues  of  the  Apocalypse  will  be  poured  upon  us, 
for  the  wrongs  committed  against  them,  and  the  slaves  of  this 
land. 

"We  have  tried  the  inapplicable  system  of  questioning  the 
political  candidates  in  this  land ;  hoping  by  that  lever  to  pry 
open  the  prison  doors. 

A  new  kind  of  political  literature  sprung  up  in  the  North, 
in  which  the  Jesuits  were  fairly  distanced,  in  their  own  cele- 
brated art ;  the  catechism  of  humanity  was  answered  by  the 
political  catechumens  in  such  mode  as  "  to  keep  the  word  of 
promise  to  the  ear,  and  break  it  to  the  hope." 

There  was  as  much  honest  complaint  against  the  askers  of 
questions  as  the  answerers.  Bad  faith  was  the  result  on  the 
part  of  the  voter  and  voted — crimination  and  recrimination 
had  brought  us  to  the  border  of  ruin.  We  were  determined 
for  a  while,  that  the  Whig  and  Democratic  parties  should 
perform  this  exalted  work  of  humanity,  and  we  seemed  to 
think,  by  a  sort  of  political  expediency  in  barter,  that  the 


LETTER   TO   DE.    BAILEY.  265 

anxiety  felt  for  our  votes,  by  the  candidates  nominated  by 
those  parties,  would  revolutionize  their  sentiments,  and  make 
them  sincere  advocates  of  the  rights  of  the  slave.  We  never, 
by  this  course,  gained  truth  an  advocate,  or  humanity  a 
friend.  Ten  candidates  either  before  or  after  the  election 
apologized  for  any  seeming  abolition  tendencies  in  their  moral 
framework,  or  by  force  of  position,  to  one,  who  has  avowed 
his  fidelity  to  our  principles. 

The  truth  has  been,  both  parties  have  been  so  corrupt  as 
to  employ  all  their  ingenuity  to  fix  on  their  adversary  the 
stigma  of  upholding  abolition ;  while  each  sought  to  wipe  out 
the  blot  of  humanity,  by  some  bold  impudent  blow,  struck 
full  in  the  face  of  Liberty,  as  an  atonement  for  the  suspicion 
of  being  just.  The  effect  at  last  was  that  a  genuine  Aboli- 
tionist of  either  of  these  parties,  could  not  be  nominated  for  a 
law-making  trust,  but  was  put  under  the  ban  of  proscription. 
And  when  a  man  was  nominated,  who  by  any  accident  bore 
the  proscribed  cognomen  of  Abolitionist,  he  was  found  almost 
uniformly  to  be  a  man,  who  from  the  futileness  of  his  powers, 
could  render  our  cause  no  service,  and  would,  if  a  man  of 
some  talent,  always  as  between  abolition  and  party,  in  a 
pinch,  go  for  party  and  sacrifice  the  slave,  at  the  very 
moment  his  strength  was  most  wanted;  these  men,  when 
nominated,  were  stool-pigeons  to  catch  our  votes.  But 
did  such  a  Whig  candidate  inspire  confidence  enough  in  a 
Democratic  Abolitionist  to  obtain  his  vote ;  or  vice  versa, 
in  a  Whig  Abolition  voter,  if  the  candidate  were  Democratic  ? 
So  nothing  but  harm  was  gained.  We  boxed  the  compass 
of  expedients.  The  Church,  Congress,  the  candidates,  were 
all  broken  reeds.  We  had  made  the  experiment  complete ; 
and  had  set  down  satisfied  that  we  could  not  bribe  men  to  do 
right,  for  the  hope  of  gaining  or  fear  of  losing  our  votes. 

This  brought  the  Abolitionists  to  a  solemn  pause.  They 
looked  all  around  the  horizon  for  help;  they  saw  Liberty 
12 


266  ALVAN    STEWART. 

everywhere  in  the  dust ;  the  moral  and  pecuniary  resources 
of  the  nation  evaporating ;  the  Republic,  through  its  great 
parties  and  denominations,  with  her  literature  both  in  Church 
and  State,  bowing  down  before  the  great  monster  slavery. 
What  should  be  down  ?  Was  this  god-like  enterprise  to  be 
abandoned  in  despair  ?  Must  the  avenging  sword,  the  mid- 
night flame,  the  forlorn  shriek  of  despair,  be  the  only  remedy 
for  this  crime. 

God  forbid,  that  the  fair  plains  of  the  South  should  be 
delivered  over  to  the  vandalism  of  such  a  terrible  necessity. 
We  found  on  review,  that  heretofore  we  ourselves  had  voted 
for  President  and  members  of  Congress  who  had  refused  to 
lift  an  ounce  of  the  weight  that  crushed  the  slave  ;  yea,  more, 
voted  to  continue  the  fetters  on,  and,  in  fact,  were  the  body- 
guard of  slavery. 

By  a  little  reflection  we  saw  ourselves  through  the  ballot- 
box  forbidding  the  slaves  deli verance,  and  refusing  the  repeal 
of  a  single  law,  by  which  he  was  bound. 

In  looking  this  question  over  in  its  amazing  breadth,  we, 
in  the  fear  of  God  determined  to  discharge  our  own  duty, 
without  any  relation  to  measures  of  subtle  contrivance,  or  of 
expediency ;  and  if  we  did  our  individual  duty,  on  others 
than  ourselves  must  be  fixed  the  sin  of  the  continuance  of 
slavery. 

We  are  born  under  a  selfocracy,  and  came  from  our 
Creator  with  a  charter  commanding  us,  at  the  age  of  majo- 
rity, as  law-makers  and  as  sovereigns,  and  law-givers, 
standing  with  these  high  responsibilities  bound  upon  us, 
commanding  us  to  do  the  greatest  good  to  the  greatest 
number ;  "  to  love  our  neighbor  as  ourselves ;"  and  "  to  do 
unto  others  as  we  would  that  others  should  do  unto  us." 
This  is  believed  to  be  one  of  the  highest  religious  duties  we 
can  perform  in  this  world.  We  are  bound  to  select  and  vote 
for  those  legislative  and  executive  officers,  who  will  employ 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  267 

their  best  faculties,  and  all  the  constitutional  power  within 
their  reach,  "  to  break  every  yoke,  and  let  the  oppressed  go 
free."  We  stand  at  the  ballot-box  legislating ;  for  our  repre- 
sentative is  but  our  agent,  our  servant,  the  mere  reflection  of 
our  concentrated  will. 

Every  prayer,  argument,  speech,  gift,  or  act,  this  side  of 
the  ballot-box,  is  but  moral  suasion ;  if  the  vote  is  cast  for  a 
liberty  candidate,  then  we  test  and  prove  the  sincerity  of  the 
prayer ;  then  we  perceive  that  moral  suasion  has  done  its 
work.  Our  prayer,  argument,  or  moral  suasion,  with  its  in- 
finite appliances,  may  be  likened  to  a  cause  in  a  court  of  jus- 
tice, the  opening,  the  evidence,  the  pleadings  of  the  counsel, 
and  charge  of  the  judge;  this  I  call  moral  suasion.  But  the 
verdict  of  the  jury  is  like  the  vote  at  the  ballot-box  ;  that  is 
the  great  fact,  this  is  the  great  act  of  prayer.  But  the  man 
who  talks  of  argument,  prayer  and  moral  suasion,  and  still 
votes  for  a  President,  or  a  member  of  Congress,  who  will 
vote  the  fetters  of  the  slave  continued  on,  that  the  slave  still 
weep  for  blows  inflicted,  that  he  still  be  deprived  of  his  wife, 
child,  Bible,  and  hope,  and  will  not  vote  a  chain  to  be  taken 
off,  on  this  voter,  prayer  and  moral  suasion  have  never  had  a 
controlling  effect,  or  he  would  not  so  vote ;  for  his  agents 
•voting  this  way,  or  refusing  to  vote  that,  is  the  act  of  the 
voter  as  much  as  the  representative's. 

The  voter  votes  in  Congress  yea  or  nay  through  his  repre- 
sentative. In  voting  for  a  member  of  Congress,  or  Presi- 
dent, or  a  member  of  the  State  legislature  (who  votes  for  the 
senators  in  Congress)  our  acts  affect  for  weal  or  woe  every 
bondman  or  freeman  in  this  great  country.  What  other  act 
in  the  even  tenor  of  a  common  man's  life,  can  equal  this  ?  Is 
it  not  in  his  ballot  that  he  demonstrates  before  God  and  man 
the  piety  and  purity  of  the  act  ? 

Let  us  look  at  the  anti-slavery  and  pro-slavery  law-givers 
standing  at  the  ballot-box,  ready  to  deposit  their  votes,  for 


268  ALVAN   STEWART. 

President  or  a  member  of  Congress.  The  Liberty  Party 
man  has  on  his  vote  the  name  of  a  genuine  Abolitionist,  as  a 
candidate  for  Congress,  and  in  that  name  is  concentrated  his 
whole  code  of  Christian  humanity;  in  that  name  on  that 
ballot  is  impliedly  these  words  by  the  voter  :  "  I  vote  for  the 
greatest  good  of  the  greatest  number  ;  I  vote  the  Declara- 
tion of  Independence  a  solemn  and  practical  reality ;  I  vote 
the  right  of  petition  be  restored ;  I  vote  a  slave  is  a  man 
and  not  a  thing,  and  has  a  better  right  to  his  own  body,  and 
its  labor,  and  to  his  wife  and  children  than  any  other  person 
on  earth ;  I  vote  the  slave  have  his  own  Bible,  and  be  per- 
mitted to  read  it  and  worship  God  as  he  sees  fit ;  I  vote  that 
his  little  children  be  sent  to  school ;  I  vote  slavery  abolished 
in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  in  Florida,  forthwith ;  I 
vote  the  internal  slave  trade  between  the  States  be  abolished, 
that  the  infernal  trade  be  punished  as  piracy  on  the  high 
seas;  I  vote  for  the  repeal  of  the  act  of  February,  1793, 
by  which  the  slaveholder  pursues  the  fugitive  slave  in  the 
free  States  ;  I  vote  that  the  Republican  form  of  government 
guaranteed  to  each  State  in  the  Constitution,  is  one  in  point 
of  form  described  in  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  in 
which  the  government  is  made  for  the  benefit  of  the  governed ; 
and  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal ;  I  vote  all  acts 
of  the  several  State  legislatures  conflicting  with  the  repub- 
lican form  of  government  aforesaid  described,  be  declared 
null  and  void,  even  if  it  set  every  slave  free  as  its  con- 
sequence ;  I  vote  that  if  it  becomes  necessary  for  the  com- 
mon defence  of  our  country  under  the  war  power,  to  take 
the  southern  chattels,  called  slaves,  and  convert  them  into 
men,  and  put  arms  in  their  hands  ;  I  then  vote  the  same  will 
be  a  constitutional  mode  of  giving  them  liberty,  and  to  hold 
the  converse  of  this  is  to  declare  slavery  must  be  continued, 
and  that  it  is  more  important  than  the  salvation  of  this 
nation  from  a  foreign  foe,  or  the  integrity  of  the  Union  in 


LETTER   TO   DK.    BAILEY.  269 

case  of  domestic  insurrection ;  I  vote  that  either  the  war 
power  or  the  treaty  power,  may,  in  certain  contingencies  be 
competent  sources  of  power  for  the  abolition  of  slavery  in 
this  nation."  The  vote  goes  in,  and  the  voter's  legislation 
and  control  over  the  slave  are  irrecoverably  gone,  for  two 
years. 

Let  us  see  what  is  contained  in  the  eye  of  Reason,  in  the 
name  of  a  pro-slavery  candidate  for  Congress.  The  pro- 
slavery  voter  stands  likewise  the  legislator  of  two  years,  at 
the  ballot-box,  and  on  that  vote  of  his  in  the  name  of  the 
candidate  is  written,  in  the  eye  of  experience,  these  other 
words:  "I  vote  that  my  candidate  for  Congress,  if  elected, 
act  with  and  under  the  dominion  of  his  party,  and  if  it  be 
necessary  to  presei've  the  power  of  our  party  that  in  casting 
his  votes,  he  bow  down  to  the  slaveholders,  then  I  so  vote ;  I 
vote  the  Declaration  of  Independence  is  a  rhetorical  flourish, 
and  that  all  men  are  not  born  free  and  equal ;  I  vote  that 
slavery  be  continued  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  the 
internal  slave  trade  be  prosecuted ;  I  vote  that  a  master  has  a 
better  right  to  his  slave,  and  to  that  slaveys  wife  and  children, 
than  the  slave  has  to  himself  or  them  ;  I  vote  the  slave  have 
no  Bible ;  I  vote  that  the  whip,  cudgel  and  fetter  be  used  as 
the  master  sees  fit ;  I  vote  the  act  of  1793  remain  unrepealed. 
In  fact  I  vote  slavery  remain  one  of  the  '  institutions  of  this 
country.'  "  The  vote  has  gone  in,  the  voter's  power  is  spent, 
and  that  vote  has  sent  a  torpedo  shock  through  the  frame  of 
the  most  remote  slave,  who  dips  his  bucket  in  the  waters 
of  the  Mexican  Gulf,  or  lifts  his  hoe  on  the  banks  of  the 
Perdido. 

How  can  a  man  pray  and  plead  729  days  for  the  slave,  and 
on  the  730th  day,  when  he  is  armed  with  the  power  of  a 
sovereign,  when  he  is  about  to  do  an  act  which  has  more 
power  and  eificacy,  than  all  he  has  said  and  done  for  two 
years  past,  prostitute  it  and  go  and  vote  for  the  master  ? — 


270  ALVAN    STEWAKT. 

vote  all  he  has  said  and  prayed  for  the  slave  to  be  bald 
hypocrisy  ?  What  would  the  master  say  to  such  a  voter  ? 
"  Ah !  well  done  good  and  faithful  servant,  you  keep  your 
prayers,  tears  and  pleas  for  the  slave,  but  in  the  trying 
moment,  you  give  the  power  to  me.  It  is  all  I  ask."  If  the 
slave  were  to  upbraid  an  Abolitionist,  who  had  voted  for  the 
master,  or  a  pro-slavery  candidate,  would  not  such  a  voter 
have  to  apologize  and  say,  "  Oh,  slave !  have  I  not  talked, 
plead  and  given  my  money,  to  wake  up  the  public  to  your 
case,  for  729  days,  and  do  you  suppose  I  am  also  to  vote  for 
you?  No  that  is  too  much:  my  730th  day  is  my  own,  my 
vote  I  give  to  my  party,  and  your  master."  "  But,"  says 
the  slave,  "give  your  729  days  of  prayer,  moral  suasion  and 
alms  to  my  master,  and  only  vote  for  me  by  casting  your 
ballot  for  an  Abolitionist,  and  I  am  content."  Have  we  not 
tried  these  parties  long  enough  ?  On  the  free  States  rests 
the  crime  of  slavery.  There  are  1,700,000  law-makers  or 
voters  in  this  land,  and  more  than  one  million  of  them  live 
in  the  free  States.  "We  can  elect  President,  Vice  President 
and  a  majority  of  the  House  of  Representatives,  and  26 
Senators  from  the  free  States,  who,  with  the  Vice  President, 
make  a  majority  of  the  Senate.  Is  not  the  mighty  power  of 
legislation  contained  in  a  vote  as  applied  to  this  amazing 
question,  one  which  involves  all  that  is  vital  in  Christianity, 
dreadful  in  the  day  of  everlasting  retribution  ?  Does  not 
this  voting  assume  an  aspect  as  sublime  as  the  Christian 
religion  can  make  it,  in  discharging  our  duty  to  our  fellow- 
man,  whose  shackles  we  can  strike  off  or  retain  ?  We  con- 
sider it  a  most  glorious  revolution,  in  our  own  minds,  by 
which  we  see  this  law-making  or  voting  to  be  a  duty  which 
exceeds  in  its  consequences  to  our  brother  man,  any  other 
act  which  we  can  perform,  touching  the  liberty  and  hopes  in 
tune  and  eternity  of  two  and  a  half  millions  of  our  race— a 
duty  big  with  the  most  important  consequences,  being  for 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  271 

good  or  evil,  the  greatest,  yes,  infinitely  the  greatest  act  we 
can  perform  for  or  against  man  in  passing  through  this 
world. 

We  have  treated  voting  and  politics  heretofore,  as  some- 
thing doubtful  in  morals,  but  at  all  events,  as  a  subject  on 
which  there  was  no  accountability  to  God.  "We  have  acted 
as  though  voting  was  a  sort  of  neutral  act,  in  which  there 
was  neither  sin  nor  holiness,  right  nor  wrong,  however  done. 
"We  have  acted  as  though  voting  was  an  act  performed  on  a 
neutral  territory,  where  the  power  of  God  did  not  extend 
on  the  one  side  for  approbation,  nor  on  the  other  for  con- 
demnation. The  American  Ballot  has  been  treated  in  such  a 
way,  in  the  pulpit  and  out,  that  a  stranger  might  suppose  we 
were  political  infidels. 

Now,  may  we  not  thank  God  that  the  anti-slavery  cause 
has  been  the  means  of  opening  our  eyes  to  the  dignity  and 
responsibility  of  legislating  with  the  fear  of  Him  before  our 
eyes.  We  cannot  bind  and  load  our  brother  with  fetters  at 
the  ballot-box,  and  be  less  guilty  before  God,  than  he  who 
does  it  on  a  plantation.  Alas,  alas !  for  52  years,  or  26  times, 
the  American  voters  have  gone  up  to  the  ballot-box  and 
taken  the  awful  sin  and  crime  of  slavery  on  their  own  souls, 
by  refusing  to  listen  to  the  souvenir  of  the  slave,  but  have 
joined  hands  with  the  wicked  master,  and  silenced  the 
mournful  cry  of  God's  unpitied  poor,  and  added  law  to  law, 
weight  to  weight,  to  his  insupportable  burdens.  Let  each 
man  legislate  under  his  deep  accountability  to  Heaven,  and 
there  would  never  be  a  pro-slavery  vote  cast  again. 


ARGUMENT,  ON  THE  QUESTION 

WHETHER   THE   NKW   CONSTITUTION   OF    1844 

ABOLISHED  SLAYEEY  IN  NEW  JERSEY. 

Supreme  Court  of  New  Jersey. — THE  STATE  vs.  EDWARD  VAN  BUREN, 
Writ  of  Habeas  Corpus. 

THE  STATE  vs.  JOHN  A.  POST,  Writ  of  Habeas  Corpus. 

Before  ike  Justices  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  New  Jersey,  the  Honora- 
ble Chief  Justice  HORNBLOWER,  and  Judges  associated,  NEVFCS, 
CARPENTER  and  EANDOLPH. 

E.  P.  PALMER,  Esq.,  Petitioner  for  the  Slave  and  Apprentice.  ALVAN 
STEWART,  Esq.,  of  the  State  of  New  York,  Counsellor  and  Advocate  for  the 
xlave  and  apprentice,  admitted  to  argue  these  causes  by  the  courtesy  of  the 
Court.  A.  0.  ZABRISKIE,  Esq.,  of  New  Jersey,  Counsel  for  VAN  BUREN  ; 
ALTAN  C.  BRADLEY,  Esq.,  of  New  York,  Counsel  for  JOHN  A.  POST. 

These  causes  were  argued  before  the  Hon.  Justices  of  the  Supreme 
Court,  at  the  Capitol  in  Trenton,  on  the  21st  and  22d  days  of  May, 
1845,  Mr.  Stewart  occupied  about  eleven  hours,  and  the  defendant's 
counsel  five  hours,  during  two  days  and  an  evening. 

The  argument  in  these  two  causes,  in  behalf  of  Mary  Telout,  held 
in  the  first  case,  as  property,  until  twenty-one  years  of  age,  her 
mother  being  a  slave,  and  she  being  nineteen  years  of  age ;  and  in  the 
second  case,  William,  a  colored  man,  claimed  by  John  A.  Post  as  a 
slave  for  life,  being  about  sixty  years  of  age.  Returns  to  the  "Writs 
of  Habeas  Corpus  were  duly  made  on  "Wednesday,  the  21st  of  May, 
1845,  in  these  causes  respectively,  before  the  justices  aforesaid. 
These  writs  had  been  granted  on  a  previous  day,  on  motion  of  Alvan 
Stewart,  Esq.,  in  open  Court. 

The  object  of  those  writs  was  to  test  the  institution  of  slavery 

272 


SLAVERY    IN   NEW   JERSEY.  273 

in  the  State  of  New  Jersey,  which  the  counsel  for  the  slave  and  ap- 
prentice contended  was  abolished,  by  the  first  section  of  the  Bill  of 
Rights,  in  the  new  Constitution  of  this  State,  which  went  into  opera- 
tion the  2d  September,  1844.  The  defendant  Van  Buren,  by  his 
counsel,  returned  to  said  writ,  that  he  held  the  said  Mary  Tebout,  by 
means  of  several  intermediate  conveyances,  from  a  person  who  owned 
the  mother  of  said  Mary  ;  the  said  mother  being  a  slave  for  life,  and 
that  the  said  Edward  claimed  to  hold  the  said  Mary,  as  his  pro- 
perty, until  she  was  twenty-one  years  of  age,  she  now  being  nineteen 
years  old,  by  virtue  of  a  Statute,  passed  for  the  gradual  abolition  of 
slavery,  in  February,  1820,  by  which  all  slaves  born  previous  to  the 
fourth  July,  1804,  were  slaves  for  life,  and  all  children  born  of  said 
slaves  after  1804,  were  declared  free,  but  to  be  held  by  the  owners  of 
their  mothers  as  apprentices  were ;  who  were  bound  out  by  the  over- 
seers of  the  poor,  males  till  twenty-five  years  of  age,  and  females 
until  twenty-one.  The  said  male  until  twenty-five,  and  female  until 
twenty-one,  were  held  by  their  owners,  their  administrators  and 
assigns,  as  property,  or  as  other  slaves  are,  until  their  time  was  out. 

The  return  in  the  case  of  John  A.  Post  was  the  same  in  substance, 
that  he  held  the  said  "William,  a  colored  man,  as  a  slave  by  virtue  of 
the  law  aforesaid,  being  born  before  1804.  To  these  returns  general 
demurrers  were  put  in,  alleging  the  institution  of  slavery  was  abo- 
lished, and  that  the  returns  did  not  state  sufficient  authority  ta 
authorize  the  defendants  to  hold  said  persons.  To  which  there  was 
a  joinder  in  demurrer. 

Both  of  these  causes  were  argued  together,  depending  on  the  same 
laws  for  their  support,  and  for  the  purpose  of  obtaining  a  judicial 
decision,  overthrowing  the  system  of  slavery  in  New  Jersey,  iu  all  its 
parts.  The  following  pages  are  the  substance  of  the  argument  and 
reply  of  Alvan  Stewart,  Esq.,  of  New  York,  who  appeared  for  the 
slave  and  servant,  as  their  counsel. 

The  first  article  of  the  new  Constitution  of  New  Jersey,  of  Septem- 
ber, 1844,  is  entitled  "  RIGHTS  AND  PRIVILEGES." 

"  All  men  are  by  nature  free  and  independent,  and  have  certain 
natural  and  inalienable  rights,  among  which  are  those  of  enjoying 
and  defending  life  and  libertyj  acquiring,  possessing  and  protecting 
property,  and  of  pursuing  and  obtaining  safety  and  happiness." 
12* 


274:  ALVAN   STEWART. 

It  was  supposed  there  were  from  seven  hundred  to  one  thousand 
slaves,  and  from  twenty-five  hundred  to  three  thousand  servants  or 
more,  whose  liberties  were  involved  in  the  argument  and  decision  of 
these  causes,  as  well  as  the  institution  itself. 

ARGUMENT. 

Alvan  Stewart,  Esq.,  arose  and  invoked  the  kind  conside- 
ration of  this  Court,  while  he  endeavored  to  break  into  a  new, 
and  almost  uncultivated  region,  to  explore  and  investigate  the 
long  neglected  rights  of  man  to  his  own  body  and  soul.  The 
courts  of  our  country  had  sounded  the  depths  of  human 
learning,  and  all  the  vast  stores  of  history,  and  the  remains 
of  antiquity  had  been  overhauled,  sifted  and  analyzed,  with 
metaphysical  sagacity,  to  determine  with  judicial  accuracy, 
all  the  rights  which  men  had  to  property,  lands  and  tene- 
ments, corporeal  and  incorporeal.  Everything  in  the  shape 
of  human  acquisition  had  been  again  and  again  labored  and 
belabored  by  the  highest  talents  of  the  land,  until  learning 
and  genius  could  do  no  more,  to  add  to  man's  possessions  ; 
while  the  great  right  of  man  to  himself,  while  innocent  of 
self-ownership,  under  all  circumstances,  is  a  great  question, 
which  has  rather  been  grazed  than  lifted  up,  shunned  than 
embraced,  or  duly  considered,  in  all  its  mighty  amplitude, 
and  its  solemn  importance  ;  and  then  only  at  distant  periods 
of  time,  and  under  the  greatest  disadvantage  in  point  of  time, 
place,  position  and  circumstance.  The  controversies  about 
lands  and  estates,  and  the  personal  rights  of  freemen,  with 
all  the  subtle  ramifications  of  the  schoolmen,  of  various  legal 
questions  of  our  age,  have  been  pressing  the  highest  judicial 
forums  of  our  land  for  decision,  and  constitute  much  of  the 
drudgery  of  counsel,  and  labor  of  the  judges.  A  modern 
legal  opinion  of  counsel  or  judge  is,  that  it  is  his  opinion  that 
he  has  clearly  discovered  wThat  was  the  opinion  of  Chief 
Justice  Mansfield,  or  Lord  Thurlow,  on  this  question,  when 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  275 

Lord  M.,  or  Lord  T.  saw  fit  to  express  an  opinion  on  this 
subject. 

Considering  the  mighty  questions  of  human  liberty  placed 
under  the  control  of  twenty-seven  State  constitutions,  their 
laws,  and  the  Federal  Constitution  and  acts  of  Congress,  and 
the  ten  thousand  forms  in  which  human  liberty  may  be 
abused,  from  the  most  horrible  slavery,  to  the  slightest  in- 
vasion of  a  trespass ;  it  seems  passing  belief,  to  be  told, 
there  is  not  one  volume  of  reports,  arguments  and  decisions, 
touching  the  great  inalienable  rights  of  man,  invaded  as  they 
are,  by  communities,  states,  and  individuals,  as  a  regular 
commerce  carried  on  in  crushed  and  violated  human  rights, 
assaulted  in  every  direction,  overthrown,  trodden  under  foot 
as  they  are,  at  every  step  and  angle  of  passing  life.  The  at- 
tention of  our  countrymen  seems  to  have  been  turned  to  the 
contingencies  and  appurtenances  of  our  race,  rather  than  to 
man,  and  the  elevation  of  the  race  itself.  Congress  has  shown 
more  anxiety  to  protect  the  hats,  the  boots,  and  the  coats 
which  men  wear,  than  the  heads  they  cover,  the  bodies  they 
surround,  and  the  feet  they  inclose.  That  grave  assembly 
can  dispute  from  Christmas  to  dog-days,  abo"ut  the  tariff, 
protection,  free  trade,  and  revenue,  while  a  petition  to 
abolish  slavery  hi  the  District  of  Columbia,  to  give  a  man  to 
himself,  a  wife  to  a  husband,  and  children  to  their  parents,  is 
received  with  profound  astonishment  as  a  moral  anomaly, 
and  when  the  House  has  recovered  from  its  surprise,  the  peti- 
tion being  so  completely  at  right  angles  with  the  course  of 
a  Republican  Congress,  that  unread,  unprinted,  undebated, 
and  undecided,  it  is  ordered  to  lie  upon  the  table,  until  the 
clerk  removes  it  to  its  sepulchral  silence  in  one  corner  of  the 
capitol,  to  rest  with  the  other  entombed  memorials  of  a 
nation's  dishonored  humanity. 

Nothing  has  been  held  so  cheap  as  our  common  humanity, 
on  a  national  average.     If  every  man  had  his  aliquot  pro- 


276  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

portion  of  the  injustice  done  in  this  land,  by  law  and  violence, 
the  present  freemen  of  the  northern  section  would,  many  of 
them,  commit  suicide  in  self-defence,  and  would  court  the 
liberties  awarded  by  Ali  Pasha  of  Egypt  to  his  subjects. 
Long  ere  this,  we  should  have  tested,  in  behalf  of  our  bleed- 
ing and  crushed  American  brothers  of  eveiy  hue  and  com- 
plexion, every  new  constitution,  custom,  or  practice,  by 
which  inhumanity  was  supposed  to  be  upheld,  the  injustice 
and  cruelty  they  contained  emblazoned  before  the  great 
tribunal  of  mankind  for  condemnation ;  and  the  good  and 
available  power  they  possessed,  for  the  relief,  deliverance, 
and  elevation  of  oppressed  men,  permitted  to  shine  forth 
from  under  the  cloud,  for  the  refreshment  of  the  human 
race. 

Yet  these  laws  and  constitutions  should  have  long  ere  this 
felt  the  weight  of  judicial  pressure,  and  their  good  or  evil 
been  made  prominent  to  the  men  of  America,  and  the  breadth 
and  depth  of  the  stream  of  national  justice  ascertained,  so 
that  we  might  know  the  exact  distance  between  our  self- 
glorifications  on  our  pompous  anniversaries,  and  the  pre- 
tended magnitude  of  our  personal  liberties,  as  compared  with 
the  stern  and  inexorable  mandates  of  judicial  decrees ;  or 
what  was  the  difference  between  an  abstract  dogma  of  liberty, 
and  a  practical  decision  of  tyranny. 

-  Alas !  said  Mr.  S.,  how  vast  the  distance  between  an  ab- 
straction and  a  practicality !  Oh !  when  shall  we  see  that 
glorious  day,  when  the  lion  and  the  lamb  shall  lie  down  to- 
gether? that  day  when  the  law,  with  its  mercy,  shall  be 
extended  to  all,  when  none  shall  be  so  powerful  as  to  over- 
ride its  injunctions,  none  so  low  as  to  fall  beneath  its  merciful 
protection  ;  defending  all  in  their  possessions ;  the  rich  man 
in  his  castle,  the  poor  man  in  his  liberty,  and  the  value  of  his 
labor,  whether  in  the  wilderness  or  in  the  city,  on  the  high- 
way or  in  the  closet  •  let  this  law  of  liberty  brace  the  strong 


SLAVERY    IN   NEW   JERSEY.  277 

man  on  his  journey,  and  its  precious  breathings  fill  the  lungs 
of  the  infant  in  the  cradle. 

Oh,  for  the  glorious  day  when  we  shall  have  freedom  for 
all,  wages  for  labor,  education  for  all,  mercy  to  all,  justice  for 
all,  and  God's  religion  in  all !  It  was  a  horrid  thought,  that 
in  the  nineteeth  century  there  should  be  found  educated  men 
who  were  so  weak,  or  so  ignorant,  as  to  suppose  the  title  to 
the  great,  inalienable,  God-given  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and 
the  pursuit  of  happiness,  depended  upon  the  complexion  of  a 
human  being,  whether  white,  black,  brown,  red,  or  in  com- 
binations of  these,  with  curled  or  long  hair,  thick  or  thin  lips ; 
the  body  is  the  casket,  the  soul,  the  immortal  mind,  is  the 
jewel.  The  jewels  are  homogeneous,  the  caskets  may  be  in- 
finitely diversified.  To  deny  the  existence  of  the  jewel,  from 
the  casket's  being  more  or  less  plain  than  some  other  we 
have  seen  (when  we  know  the  jewel  is  within),  is  not  more 
absurd  than  to  make  a  man's  right  to  liberty  depend  upon 
the  color  of  his  skin.  But,  such  is  the  raw  material  of  apo- 
logies for  gross  wickedness,  and  the  vileness  of  the  material 
is  never  improved  by  its  manufacture.  The  raw  material,  its 
manufacture,  the  manufacturer,  and  the  consumer,  of  such 
strange  productions,  ought  to  be  bottled  and  hermetically 
sealed,  where  they  might  be  seen  through  a  glass  case  as 
certain  lusus  naturce,  or  as  a  calf  with  two  tails  and  no 
head,  are  seen  in  some  of  our  museums. 

In  order  to  understand  the  blessings  which  the  new  con- 
stitution of  this  State  confers  on  the  subject  of  liberty,  it  may 
not  be  amiss  to  look,  for  a  few  moments,  at  the  past  ages  of 
the  world,  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  and  see  how  the  men  of 
antiquity  saw  and  treated  this  terrible  perversion  of  human 
rights.  The  ancient  world,  before  the  advent  of  our  blessed 
Saviour,  was  filled  with  this  awful  crime.  All  pagan  lands 
abounded  with  idolatry  and  slavery.  But  the  glorious  new 
religion,  wherever  it  made  a  lodgment,  amidst  cruel  scourg- 


278  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

ings,  the  fagot  and  the  flame,  the  block  and  the  cross,  the 
dungeon  and  the  gibbet,  obtained  the  ascendency ;  and  this 
dreadful  institution  fell  before  the  mercy  of  the  cross. 
From  the  conversion  of  Constantine  in  the  fourth  century, 
until  the  twelfth,  Christianity  fought  her  victorious  battle 
with  slavery,  and  came  off  conqueror,  and  drove  it  from  the 
entire  regions  of  continental  Europe,  or  wherever  Christianity 
obtained  a  foothold  throughout  Christendom.  To  be  sure, 
there  existed,  owing  to  the  Feudal  Law,  a  sort  of  serf- 
dom, in  some  countries,  which  was  different  in  application 
and  character  from  the  chattelhood  of  slavery.  Time  fails  to 
tell  how  the  various  devices  of  pope,  pontiff,  bishops,  eccle- 
siastical councils,  decrees  of  councils,  of  kings,  diets,  and  par- 
liaments, accomplished,  during  what  is  called  the  dark  ages, 
this  most  glorious  work. 

But  the  ever-memorable  year  of  1492  came,  forever  to  be 
reckoned  the  most  wonderful  in  the  history  of  our  race  since 
our  Saviour  was  born — a  new  world  was  discovered  by  Chris- 
topher Columbus,  the  grandest  man  of  his  race. 

The  human  passions  burst  into  a  mighty  flame,  fed  by  the 
accursed  thirst  of  gold,  discovery,  and  conquest.  The 
peaceable  and  inoffensive  red  man  of  the  islands  of  the  An- 
tilles was  forced  as  a  slave  to  do  work  in  the  fields  and  in  the 
mines  ;  and  of  that  age  of  innocent  red  men,  a  whole  genera- 
tion found  that  mercy  in  death,  which  their  Spanish  con- 
querors denied  them.  The  good  Las  Casas,  moved  by  a 
considerate  sympathy  for  the  red  man,  absurdly  recom- 
mended to  his  prince  and  country,  to  repeal  slavery  as  to  the 
red  man  who  could  not  endure  its  cruelty,  and  in  lieu,  abduct 
and  kidnap  laborers  from  the  burning  tropics  of  Africa  ;  and 
from  1520  this  dreadful  wound  was  opened  in  the  side  of 
Africa,  which  has  continued  from  year  to  year,  and  from  cen- 
tury to  century,  to  flow  on  without  intermission,  until  this 
very  hour.  For  more  than  300  years  has  Africa  been  de- 


SLAVEEY   IN   NEW   JEESET.  279 

spoiled  of  her  people  by  the  kidnappers  from  the  nations  of 
Christendom,  until  Christendom  in  three  centuries  had  made 
it  the  laic  of  nations  to  rob  the  men  of  Africa  of  life,  liberty, 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  and  made  and  revived  the  ex- 
tinct law  of  slavery,  and  with  armed  bands  marched  into  de- 
fenceless villages  on  the  Senegal  and  Gambia,  set  their  habi- 
tations at  midnight  'on  fire,  and  with  pistols,  swords,  fetters 
and  ropes,  pursued  and  overtook  the  distracted  people  and 
bound  and  sent  them  to  this  continent  amidst  hunger,  thirst, 
contagion,  disease,  and  death,  the  survivors  in  the  pirate's 
ship,  and  in  a  land  of  strangers,  they  were  sold  to  drag  out 
life  on  the  plantation  of  the  haughty,  the  thankless,  and  the 
cruel.  By  such  deplorable  means  has  this  continent  fought 
against  her  own  prosperity. 

Mr.  Stewart  then  said  he  had  two  cases  in  his  mind,  which 
illustrated  what  all  knew  respecting  slavery,  and  few  whose 
opinions  were  entitled  to  respect  would  dare  deny  them. 

Said  he,  lifting  his  head  and  turning  to  the  northeast,  di- 
recting all  to  look,  and  see  what  they  could  behold  on  the 
last  day  of  November,  1620,  on  the  confines  of  the  Grand 
Banks  of  Newfoundland — lo !  I  behold  one  little  solitary 
tempest-tost  and  weather-beaten  ship,  it  is  all  that  can  be 
seen  on  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  vast  intervening  soli- 
tudes ;  from  the  melancholy  wilds  of  Labrador  and  New 
England's  iron-bound  shores,  to  the  -western  coasts  of  Ireland 
and  the  rock-defended  Hebrides,  but  one  lonely  ship  greets 
the  eye  of  angels  or  of  men,  on  this  great  thoroughfare  of 
nations  in  our  age.  Next  in  moral  grandeur  was  this  ship 
to  the  great  discoverer's  ;  Columbus  found  a  Continent ;  the 
Mayflower  brought  the  seed-wheat  of  states  and  empire. 
That  is  the  Mayflower,  with  its  servants  of  the  Living  God, 
their  wives  and  little  ones,  hastening  to  lay  the  foundations 
of  nations  in  the  occidental  lands  of  the  setting  sun.  Hear, 
the  voice  of  prayer  to  God,  for  his  protection,  and  the  glorious 


280  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

music  of  praise,  as  it  breaks  into  the  wild  tempest  of  the 
mighty  deep,  upon  the  ear  of  God.  Here  in  this  ship  are 
great  and  good  men.  Justice,  mercy,  humanity,  respect  for 
the  rights  of  all ;  each  man  honored,  as  he  was  useful  to  him- 
self and  others  ;  labor-respecting,  law-abiding  men,  constitu- 
tion-making and  respecting-men  ;  men  whom  no  tyrant  could 
conquer,  or  hardship  overcome,  with  the  high  commission 
sealed  by  a  spirit  Divine,  to  establish  religious  and  political 
liberty  for  all.  This  ship  had  the  embryo-elements  of  all 
that  is  useful,  great  and  grand  in  northern  institutions ;  it 
was  the  great  type  of  goodness  and  wisdom,  illustrated  in 
two  and  a  quarter  centuries  gone  by ;  it  was  the  good  genius 
of  America. 

But,  look  far  in  the  southeast,  and  you  behold  on  the  same 
day  in  1620,  a  low,  rakish  ship  hastening  from  the  tropics, 
solitary  and  alone,  to  the  New  World  ;  what  is  she  ?  She  is 
freighted  with  the  elements  of  unmixed  evil ;  hark !  hear  those 
rattling  chains,  hear  that  cry  of  despair  and  wail  of  anguish 
as  they  die  away  in  the  unpitying  distance.  Listen  to  those 
shocking  oaths,  the  crack  of  that  flesh-cutting  whip.  Ah  !  it 
is  the  first  cargo  of  slaves  on  their  way  to  Jamestown,  Vir- 
ginia. Behold  the  Mayflower  anchored  at  Plymouth  rock, 
the  slave  ship  in  James  River.  Each  a  parent,  one  of  the 
prosperous,  labor-honoring,  law-sustaining  institutions  of  the 
North ;  the  other  the  mother  of  slavery,  idleness,  lynch-law, 
ignorance,  unpaid  labor,  poverty,  and  duelling,  despotism, 
the  ceaseless  swing  of  the  whip,  and  the  peculiar  institutions 
of  the  South.  These  ships  are  the  representation  of  good  and 
evil  in  the  New  World,  even  to  our  day.  When  shall  one  of 
those  parallel  lines  come  to  an  end  ? 

Mr.  Stewart  then  proceeded  to  the  definition  and  origin  of 
the  word  slave.  He  cited  the  encyclopedia  under  title,  slave, 
as  authority.  The  word,  according  to  Vossius,  is  derived 
from  sclaviiSy  the  name  of  a  Scythian  people,  called  the  Scla- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  281 

voni.  The  Romans  called  slaves  servi,  from  servare,  to  keep 
or  save,  being  such  as  were  not  killed  in  battle,  but  were 
saved  to  work  or  yield  money.  A  slave  bred  in  a  family  was 
called  verna,  hence  our  word  vernacular,  or  the  slave's 
tongue. 

A  Roman  slave  being  set  free,  took  the  cognomen  of  his 
master  for  his  sur  or  sir-name,  and  his  slave  name  for  his 
Christian — hence,  our  surname  means  the  name  of  the  lord 
or  sir.  So  curiously  has  slavery  interwoven  itself  in  the  affairs 
of  men,  that  all  men  are  made  most  singularly  to  feel  the  dis- 
grace of  the  institution  in  their  paternal  name.  The  Romans 
had  those  called  mercenarily  who  had  been  rich,  but  having 
become  poor,  sold  themselves  for  a  time. 

The  Greeks  had  those  called  Prodigals,  who,  having  lost 
their  estates  by  their  .  extravagance,  were  sold  to  discharge 
their  debts  by  law,  for  a  longer  or  shorter  time.  Delinquents 
to  the  revenue,  or  unfaithful  subtreasurers  of  the  Roman  Em- 
pire, were  sent  to  the  oar  as  slaves.  But  Tacitus  describes  the 
most  remarkable  slaves  ("De  Moribus  Germanorum,")  called 
enthusiasts,  who  were  gamblers,  who  having  staked  and  lost 
their  money,  goods  and  lands,  finally  staked  their  own  bodies, 
and  if  they  lost,  the  strong  and  the  young  lifted  up  their 
hands  and  received  the  fetters  thereon,  from  the  aged  and 
weak,  and  were  marched  off  forthwith  to  the  slave  market 
and  sold  by  the  winner  as  slaves  for  life.  This  was  done 
under  the  code  of  a  gambler's  honor. 

Those  are  the  two  kinds,  among  the  ancients,  of  slavery, 
voluntary  and  involuntary.  Some  think  slavery  did  not  exist 
before  the  flood.  But  Alexander  Pope  thinks  differently,  and 
says: 

"  Proud  Nimrod  first  the  bloody  chase  began, 
A  mighty  hunter  and  his  prey  was  man." 

A  man  has  no  right  to  sell  himself,  and  if  he  had,  he  could 


282  ALVAN   STEWART. 

not  bind  his  posterity.  A  man  is  not  allowed  to  kill  himself. 
Blac.  Book  1,  0.  14  ;  Montesquieu'' s  Spirit  of  Laws,  b.  15, 
c.  2,  and  6.  Both  say,  if  a  man  might  be  taken  in  war  and  made 
a  slave,  this  war-right  of  the  captor  could  not  extend  to  the 
captives  posterity.  This  alone  would  abolish  slavery.  The 
Romans  exercised  the  power  of  life  and  death  over  a  slave. 
So  do  slaveholders  in  the  United  States  under  certain  circum- 
stances ;  if  the  slave  refuse  to  work,  he,  the  master,  may,  by 
slave  law,  whip  and  beat  him  until  he  is  dead,  unless  he  sub- 
mits to  go  to  work ;  or  if  a  slave  attempt  to  run  away,  and 
the  master  commands  him  to  stop,  and  he  refuses,  the  master 
may  shoot  him  down,  and  the  slave  laws  of  more  than  ten 
States  say,  amen.  The  Romans  were  very  cruel,  and  had  an 
island  in  the  Tiber,  where  by  law,  they  might  send  old,  useless 
and  sick  slaves  to  starve  to  death  or  die.  It  said  as  an  evidence 
of  slavery's  hardening  of  the  heart  to  human  suffering,  that  the 
elder  Cato  sold  his  superannuated  slaves  for  any  price  rather 
than  maintain  them.  The  Romans  had  slave  dungeons  under 
ground,  called  "  ergastula,"  where  the  slaves  were  worked  in 
chains.  The  same  in  Sicily,  which  country  was  cultivated  by 
slaves  in  chains.  Eunus  and  Athenio  excited  an  insurrection 
of  60,000  slaves  and  broke  up  the  dungeons. 

But  we  are  more  immediately  interested  in  the  light  in 
which  our  English  ancestors  viewed  these  great  questions  of 
human  rights,  and  we  have  derived  most  of  our  ideas  of  law 
and  liberty  from  that  interesting  source.  The  case  of  Somer- 
set, to  be  found  in  the  20th  vol.  of  British  State  Trials,  also 
in  Long's  Reports  and  Burrows',  is  one  of  manifold  interest. 
It  was  justly  said  by  that  great  lawyer  and  civilian,  Mr.  Har- 
grave,  the  counsel  of  the  slave  Somerset,  though  greatly  aided 
in  his  brief  by  that  eminent  philanthropist,  Granville  Sharp, 
"  that  slavery  corrupts  the  morals  of  the  master  by  freeing 
him  from  those  restraints  so  necessary  for  the  control  of  the 
human  passions,  so  beneficial  in  promoting  the  practice 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  283 

and  confirming  the  habit  of  virtue."  It  is  often  dangerous 
to  the  master,  as  exciting  implacable  resentments  on  the  part 
of  the  slave. 

Slavery  communicates  all  the  afflictions  of  life  to  its  victim 
without  leaving  scarce  any  of  the  pleasures ;  it  depresses  the 
excellence  of  the  slave's  nature,  by  denying  to  the  slave  the 
ordinary  means  of  improvement  and  elevation  in  the  social 
scale  of  existence ;  it  brings  forth  the  gross,  malignant,  cruel, 
mean,  deceitful  and  hypocritical  portions  of  human  nature, 
without  a  counterpoise  or  a  power  of  suppression.  The  slave 
is  always  the  natural  and  implacable  enemy  of  the  State ;  he 
owes  it  nothing  but  deadly  hate. 

Instead  of  the  Constitution  and  the  laws  being  his  shield 
and  his  inheritance,  they  are  employed  to  strip  him  of  his 
natural  rights,  of  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness, 
existing  antecedent  to  all  human  compacts  ;  and  what  should 
be  employed  for  his  protection  and  defence  in  the  shape  of 
law,  is  used  tor  his  prostration  and  destruction.  It  is  the 
element  of  constant  fear  to  the  family  and  the  State,  and  is 
therefore  real  weakness  to  the  State  fiom  the  constant  appre- 
hension from  insurrection  at  home,  or  invasion  from  abroad, 
when  it  is  always  expected  the  slave  will  range  himself  in  the 
ranks  of  the  invader  of  the  land.  The  slave  has  no  country, 
no  real  home  for  which  he  will  fight.  Judge  of  the  surprise 
of  General  Lafayette,  when  on  the  first  day  of  being  intro- 
duced to  the  American  Congress  in  Philadelphia,  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1777,  he  listened  to  the  extraordinary  request  of 
South  Carolina  to  be  released  from  raising  and  equipping  the 
quota  of  troops  designed  by  Congress  to  be  raised  by  that 
State  as  her  proportion  in  the  eventful  struggle  of  the  K evo- 
lution, on  the  ground  that  if  she  spared  that  number  of  troops 
from  the  State,  it  was  feared  that  there  might  be  a  servile 
insurrection ;  that  it  was  necessary  the  troops  should  remain 
at  home  to  restrain  a  domestic  enemy  in  her  own  bosom.  If 


ALVAN   STEWART. 

all  the  States  had  been  under  the  weight  of  slavery  like  South 
Carolina,  our  Independence  could  never  have  been  achieved. 
Such  States  as  South  Carolina  may  bluster  and  threaten  their 
brethren  in  time  of  peace  with  nullification  and  revolution, 
but  when  war  comes,  her  power  to  act  out  of  her  own  terri- 
tory will  be  in  the  inverse  ratio  of  the  noise  and  threats  she 
made  in  time  of  peace.  The  enemy  of  her  own  household 
will  furnish  a  good  market,  not  only  for  her  capabilities  but 
her  courage.  If  the  home  market  is  the  best  one,  she 
will  find  one  at  her  own  door,  as  ample  as  her  productions 
may  be  abundant. 

In  the  late  war,  about  midsummer  of  1814,  this  nation 
was  overwhelmed  with  shame,  grief  and  astonishment,  at  the 
capture  and  sack  of  the  city  of  Washington,  by  a  body  of 
British  troops,  soldiers,  sailors,  and  marines. 

The  public  authorities  had  sufficient  notice  of  the  enemy's 
intention,  the  militia  of  the  three  cities  of  the  District,  and 
of  the  surrounding  counties  in  the  adjacent  portions  cf  the 
old  States  of  Virginia  and  Maryland,  could  have  driven  the 
British  force  into  the  sea,  had  not  a  report  been  universally 
circulated  on  the  morning  of  the  battle,  and  on  the  battle- 
ground at  Bladensburgh,  that  the  slaves  of  the  District  and 
of  the  adjacent  counties,  from  which  the  militia  were  drawn 
for  the  defence  of  Washington,  were  to  rise  that  day  in 
insurrection  in  the  absence  of  their  masters.  The  moment  the 
British  approached  our  troops,  President  Madison,  with  the 
Secretaries  of  the  Departments,  fled  from  position  to  position, 
abandoning,  as  all  who  know  the  ground  may  see,  one  favora- 
ble place  after  another,  and  finally  retreated  eight  miles,  from 
Bladensburgh  to  Washington,  and  at  last  the  retreat  became 
a  general  rout ;  each  man  having  his  mind  on  the  danger  he 
feared  in  his  own  house  or  plantation  from  the  insurrection 
of  his  slaves,  rather  than  the  immediate  work  of  defending 
the  Capitol  of  the  nation.  This  is  a  perfect  solution  of  that 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  285 

disgraceful  affair.  It  was  the  natural  consequence  which  the 
weakness  of  a  servile  population  creates,  and  the  fear  in  a 
day  of  adversity  which  it  will  inspire. 

Mr.  S.,  said  he  learned  the  cause  of  our  disaster  in  1818, 
while  going  over  the  ground  of  this  disgraceful  retreat,  with 
a  general,  who  was  a  brigadier  on  that  mortifying  day,  and 
who  assigned  the  above  reasons  to  him  as  the  cause  of  this 
most  shameful  result. 

John  Locke  declared  a  right  to  preserve  life  is  inalienable ; 
that  freedom  from  the  exercise  of  arbitrary  power  is  essential 
for  the  exercise  of  this  right. 

In  the  sixth  year  of  the  reign  of  Edward  III.,  1334,  a  law 
was  enacted  declaring  that  all  idle  vagabonds  should  be 
made  slaves,  fed  on  bread  and  water  or  small  drink,  and 
refuse  meat,  and  should  wear  an  iron  ring  around  their  necks 
and  legs,  and  should  be  compelled  by  beating,  chaining  and 
otherwise,  to  perform  the  work  assigned,  were  it  never  so 
vile ;  the  spirit  of  the  English  nation  could  not  brook  this, 
as  applied  to  the  most  abandoned  rogues,  and  repealed  the 
law  in  two  years  after  its  enactment.  But  nothing  places  the 
judiciary  of  England  on  higher  ground,  than  its  patient 
work  in  extirpating  villenage  from  England.  It  was  an  insti- 
tution connected  with  the  feudal  system,  and  the  Norman 
Conquest  of  1060,  and  the  other  conquests  obtained  in  pre- 
vious ages,  and  was  nearly  allied  to  slavery,  in  everything  but 
the  name,  so  that  it  is  supposed  that  at  one  period,  there 
were  not  less  than  three  quarters  of  the  population  of  the 
kingdom,  who  were  either  villeins  regardant,  or  villeins  in 
gross.  The  dishonor  of  such  a  state  of  things  has  been  so 
deeply  felt  by  thousands,  who  are  descendants  of  these  bond- 
men in  England,  and  who  now  rank  high  in  the  scale  of 
society,  that  there  is  rather  a  desire  to  conceal  than  reveal 
the  odious  state  in  which  our  ancestors  existed ;  therefore, 
David  Hume  and  Sir  William  Blackstone  are  very  niggardly 


286  ALVAN    6TEWAKT. 

in  dealing  out  information  on  an  infamous  and  obsolete  insti- 
tution, so  humiliating  to  our  ancestors,  and  humbling  to  their 
descendants. 

But,  to  understand  the  terrible  hardships  endured  and  suf- 
fered by  our  ancestors,  for  many  generations,  and  the  glorious 
way  of  their  deliverance  by  the  judges  of  England,  may  furnish 
us  with  valuable  deductions,  which  maybe  applied  to  solve  any 
difficulty  growing  out  of  the  causes  under  consideration,  by 
learning  what  use  a  court  may  make  of  law  to  establish  justice. 

A  villein  in  blood  and  by  tenure  was  one  whom  the  lord 
might  whip  and  imprison.  The  villein  could  acquire  no  pro- 
perty except  for  the  lord.  "  Quidquid  acquiritur  servo, 
acquiritur  domino"  A  villein  regardant  passed  with  the 
land  of  his  lord,  on  which  he  lived  as  a  kind  of  property  like 
the  trees,  but  might  be  severed  and  sold  when  the  lord 
pleased. —  Co.  Littleton,  117  a.  If  he  was  a  villein  in  gross, 
he  was  an  hereditament,  or  chattel  real,  according  to  the 
lord's  interest,  being  descendable  to  the  heir,  when  the  lord 
was  absolute  owner  of  the  soil,  and  the  executor,  when  the  lord 
was  possessor  for  only  a  term  of  years.  The  common  law 
held,  if  both  parents  were  villeins,  or  the  father  only,  the  issue 
were  villeins.  The  child  at  common  law  followed  the  condi- 
tion of  the  father,  Partus  sequitur  patrem  ;  while  the  civil 
law  held,  Partus  sequitur  ventrem.  Therefore,  it  was  a 
departure  from  all  principle,  for  the  slaveholders  of  the  United 
States,  who,  if  they  inherited  anything  from  England, 
inherited  the  common  law,  to  substitute  the  principle  of  the 
civil  law,  because  they  could  make  more  money  by  it,  and 
say  the  child  in  slavery  should  follow  the  condition  of  the 
mother,  when  the  common  law  said  it  should  follow  the 
father !  But  why  reason  on  a  subject,  when  brute  force  and 
selfishness  stand  in  the  place  of  right  reason  and  truth  ?  Had 
the  doctrine  of  the  common  law  been  followed,  slavery,  from 
its  mulattoism,  a  significancy  of  the  times,  would  have  been 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  287 

in  its  last  quarter.  The  object  of  drawing  this  all  but  obso- 
lete learning  from  past  centuries,  was  not  to  make  a  public 
parade  for  the  sake  of  its  strangeness ;  but  to  show  in  the 
great  struggle,  in  past  ages,  between  slavery  and  liberty, 
how  the  judiciary  of  England  conducted  itself  in  those 
encounters  between  the  powers  of  light  and  darkness. 

The  Courts  of  Law  in  the  British  Isles,  from  the  Conquest 
down,  employed  every  iutendment  of  humanity,  every  device, 
every  fiction,  in  behalf  of  the  unfortunate  serf.  One  rule 
was,  for  the  court  always  to  presume  in  favor  of  liberty  ;  but 
in  some  thirteen  States  of  our  Union,  if  a  man  is  of  African 
descent,  he  is  presumed  a  slave,  until  the  victim  proves  a 
negative.  In  England,  the  onus  probandi  lay  on  him  who 
asserted  slavery  or  villenage.  If  a  villein  prosecuted  a  writ 
of  Ifomine  Replegiando  against  his  lord,  on  the  trial  the  lord 
had  to  prove  affirmatively  that  the  plaintiff  was  his  villein, 
and  the  villein,  though  the  plaintiff,  might  stand  still  in  court 
till  that  was  done  by  the  defendent.  The  lord's  remedy  for  a 
fugitive  villein  was  the  writ  Nativo  Habendo,  or  Neifty.  If 
the  lord  seized  the  villein  by  his  writ  of  Nativo  Habendo, 
the  villein  procured  the  writ  of  Ifomine  Replegiando,  or 
Libertate  Probanda. 

By  the  writ  of  Nativo  Habendo,  the  master  asserted 
slavery,  and  if  the  master  was  once  nonsuited,  he  could  never 
sue  the  serf  again,  and  the  villein  might  plead  the  record  of 
nonsuit  as  a  perpetual  bar.  Not  so,  if  the  villein  was  non- 
suited on  the  writ  of  Homine  Replegiando,  or  Libertate  Pro- 
banda. He  might  sue  again  for  his  liberty,  and  the  record 
of  nonsuit,  if  made  ten  times  or  more  against  him,  could 
never  be  pleaded  or  used  against  him.  The  slightest  mistake 
on  the  part  of  the  lord,  or  accident,  was  laid  hold  of  by  the 
court  to  defeat  the  recovery  of  the  lord. — Somerset's  Case, 
20th  vol.  of  HaswelPs  State  Trials.  So  this  honorable  court 
of  New  Jersey  should  do,  under  the  new  constitution  of  this 


288  ALVAN   STEWAET. 

State— the  constitution  adopted  by  the  people  in  1844.  This 
court,  in  accordance  with  the  noble  example  of  England's 
judiciary,  should  make  every  intendment  in  behalf  of  your 
bondmen,  as  between  the  selfish  and  cruel  demand  of  slavery 
and  the  ceaseless  cry  of  liberty.  Give  the  slave  the  benefit 
of  every  sensible  doubt,  which  may  cloud  the  mind  of  this 
honorable  court. 

Sueing,  or  being  sued  by  a  villein,  freed  him.  The  lord's 
granting  him  an  imparlance,  manumitted  him,  or  asking  an 
imparlance  of  the  villein  did  the  same.  Almost  the  last  case 
of  villenage  reported,  was  near  the  year  1600,  on  the  acces- 
sion of  James  I.  Crouch's  case  is  reported  in  Dyer.  All  of 
these  obstructions  thrown  in  the  way  of  this  sort  of  slavery, 
are  most  interesting  legal  relics  of  servitude,  showing  the 
metaphysical  dress  in  which  it  was  clothed  by  our  subtle  and 
ingenious  ancestors.  These  were  patterns  of  extinct  fashions 
of  opinions,  now  only  to  be  found  in  the  ponderous  tomes  of 
antiquity,  garnered  up  in  the  library  of  the  legal  antiquarian  ; 
as  the  visors,  steel  and  brass  armor,  of  the  10th  century,  dis- 
close to  us  the  mode  and  appearance  of  the  knights  on  the 
field  of  battle  in  the  days  of  chivalry. 

To  establish  villenage,  the  villein  must  be  proved  such  by 
two  other  male  villeins,  ex  eodem  stirpe,  from  the  same  stock, 
or  the  villein  might  confess  in  open  court,  being  a  court  of 
record,  that  he  was  one.  The  female  villein  was  not  allowed 
her  testimony  to  prove  a  man  a  villein.  A  villein  was  called 
nativus,  as  well  as  villanus,  from  the  lord's  villa,  nativus 
from  being  found  on  the  soil — a  native.  The  lord,  on  declar- 
ing on  a  writ  Nativo  Hdbendo,  had  to  bring  his  two  witnesses 
with  him  at  the  same  instant  he  declared,  and  if  he  did  not, 
the  villein  went  forever  free.  A  man  might  plead  bastardy,  in 
himself,  father,  grandfather  or  ancestors,  and  if  the  plea  be 
true,  that,  alone,  manumitted  the  villein,  for  ihejilius  mdlius 
estfiliu*  popitli.  For  if  there  was  a  link  of  illegitimacy,  it  set 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEKSET.  289 

the  line  of  descendants  from  the  bastard  free,  because  the  lord 
could  not  show  that  he  was  the  son  of  his  bondmen  in  par- 
ticular. 

Another  plea  of  the  villein  was  called  adventiff  by  the 
Norman  French  Law,  showing  that  a  person  was  born  off 
from  the  manor,  and  if  true,  it  set  the  man  and  his  descend- 
ants free. 

Sir  Thomas  Grantham,  about  the  year  1684,  bought  a 
monster  in  the  East  Indies,  and  brought  him  to  England  as  a 
show.  The  monster  had,  growing  on  his  breast,  the  entire 
parts  of  a  child,  except  its  head.  The  monster  being  carried 
through  the  kingdom  as  a  show,  was  baptized,  and  he 
brought  a  writ  of  Homine  Replegiando  against  his  master, 
and  was  set  free. 

I  have  done  with  villenage  in  England — such  in  a  dark  age 
was  the  view  which  learned  jurists  and  judges  took  of  this 
important  matter.  The  judiciary  in  many  countries  have 
been,  at  different  periods  of  civilization,  the  last  branch  of 
human  government,  to  feel  the  force  of  popular  opinion,  in 
behalf  of  liberty,  or  employ  its  power  in  accelerating  the 
march  of  freedom,  or  the  overthrow  of  strongholds  of  forti- 
fied oppression.  It  is  not  a  matter  of  complaint  that  the 
judiciary  is  the  hold-back  power  of  the  State,  or  conservative 
in  its  character,  but  with  all  that,  it  has  a  high  mission  to 
discharge  on  the  part  of  liberty.  And  the  English  judiciary 
have  shown  the  world  during  those  dark  ages  what  they 
understood  to  be  contained  in  their  commissions,  touching 
England's  bondmen,  even,  under  the  iron  rule  of  the  haughty 
Norman  and  his  imperious  descendants,  who,  by  rights  of 
conquest,  and  by  the  subserviency  of  supple  parliaments  con- 
nected with  the  agency  of  the  Feudal  System,  had  reduced 
four-fifths  of  the  inhabitants  of  England  to  the  condition  of 
villeins  regardant,  and  villeins  in  gross,  attached  to  the  soil, 
or  the  person  of  some  grandee  of  the  realm,  as  slaves,  whom 
13 


290  ALVAN   8TEWAKT. 

their  lord  might  scourge,  sell,  or  transfer  with  the  soil,  or  at 
will. 

The  judiciary  of  England  became  the  Temple  of  Mercy  to 
which  these  unfortunate  bondmen  cast  their  imploring  eyes 
for  relief  through  a  succession  of  five  cruel  centuries,  during 
eighteen  generations  of  men.  The  courts  of  English  "law 
during  this  long  period,  employed  all  the  subtleties,  fictions, 
and  presumptions,  in  which  the  English  Law  abounds,  in 
behalf  of  the  liberty  of  these  grossly  injured  men,  so  that  at 
last,  the  sublime  moral  spectacle  was  presented  to  this  world, 
of  many  unrepealed  statutes,  and  the  common  law  still  in  full 
force  in  favor  of  villenage,  while  the  bloody  useless  fetters 
hung  on  the  tyrant's  dungeon  walls,  but  the  last  bondman  of 
the  three-fourths  of  the  population  of  a  mighty  kingdom  was 
enfranchised  from  captivity,  by  force  of  England's  glorious 
judiciary  alone.  The  king,  andiron-mailed  barons,  the  land- 
owners, and  man-holders,  were  foiled,  and  their  prey  taken 
from  their  power  by  the  resolution  of  the  judges,  who,  being 
determined,  did  administer  justice  through  the  law. 

Montesquieu  says  that  Aristotle,  in  reasoning  to  sustain 
slavery  as  derived  from  war,  cites  authorities  from  barbarous 
ages,  and  appears  in  this  matter  as  unphilosophical  as  he  does 
in  the  nature  of  the  thing.  The  war-power  to  be  the  source 
of  a  right,  when  the  war  is  prosecuted  for  no  other  motive 
except  the  value  of  the  captive,  is  as  rational  as  to  give  the 
robber  title  to  his  spoil,  because  he  had  the  courage  to  take 
it— making  a  crime  the  most  bold  and  daring,  the  parent  of  a 
civil  right.  Behold  bleeding  Africa,  for  three  hundred  years 
her  wounded  side  has  flowed,  and  yet  flows  on,  unstaunched 
by  the  humanity  of  the  nations.  Behold  this  accursed  crime 
which  has  crawled  up  with  brutal  impudence,  and  enthroned 
itself  as  one  amongst  the  laws  of  nations.  Laws  of  nations! 
What  was  this  law  of  nations  ?  That  Christendom  had  a 
common  right  to  plunder,  bum,  murder^  enslave  irredeema- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  291 

bly,  and  make  property  of  the  inhabitants  of  that  ill-fated 
continent,  in  and  through  all  coming  generations  of  their  pos- 
terity. A  law  of  nations!  that  all  law,  justice,  mercy, 
humanity,  should  be  suspended,  as  to  one  quarter  of  the 
globe ;  a  law  of  nations,  that  piracy,  murder,  fraud,  arson, 
kidnapping,  ravishment  and  stealing,  should  be  considered 
lawful  as  an  injunction  of  the  law  of  nations,  to  be  honored 
and  obeyed.  A  law  of  nations  directly  at  war  with  every 
other  law  constituting  that  code ;  a  law  of  nations,  striking 
justice  down,  and  sending  it  into  eternal  banishment 'from  the 
world,  subverting  the  decalogue  of  God,  blaspheming  Omni- 
potence, brandishing  the  powers  of  perdition  in  the  face  of 
the  Allseeing,  calling  this  bold  defiance  of  the  Almighty,  the 
law  of  nations  !  Out  upon  such  infinite  perversion,  such 
inexpressible  criminality.  Russia,  Prussia,  Holland,  Austi'ia, 
England,  France,  Sardinia  and  the  United  States,  in  the  last 
forty  years,  as  it  regards  themselves,  by  treaty  and  legisla- 
tion, have  abolished  their  respective  portions  in  this  frightful 
law  of  nations,  while  Spain,  Portugal  and  Brazil,  three  of 
the  basest  kingdoms  of  earth,  are  now  retrograding  into  the 
darkness  of  barbarism  and  infamy,  and  without  competition 
are  now  almost  the  exclusive  proprietors  of  this  law  of 
nations  and  its  abounding  criminality.  Look  at  Spain  three 
hundred  and  fifty-three  years  ago,  as  she  stood  on  the  day  of 
Columbus'  discovery,  head  and  shoulders  above  the  powers 
of  Europe.  Conquest,  avarice,  slavery  and  idleness,  which 
she  introduced  to  the  'new  world,  re-acted  on  her,  and  in 
our  day,  she  has  been  stripped  of  her  mines,  her  provinces, 
viceroyalties,  kingdoms  and  one  half  of  a  continent,  and  is 
now  reduced  to  the  island  of  Cuba,  with  its  crimes  of  flowing 
blood,  slavery,  idleness  and  avarice  ;  these  relatives  have  been 
punished  in  so  signal  a  manner,  in  the  case  of  Spain,  by  Him 
who  rules  the  destinies  of  nations,  that  to  deny  it,  is  a  proof 
that  our  ignorance  is  only  surpassed  by  our  infidelity. 


292  ALVAN   STEWART. 

The  court  will  pardon  me  in  these  remarks,  which  in  the 
first  instance  may  appear  remote  from  this  question,  yet  when 
we  consider  the  character  of  the  human  mind,  they  will  all  be 
found  to  bear  on  the  great  question  in  the  Constitution  of 
this  State.  "What  do  we  mean  by  liberty  and  independence? 
Infinitely  absurd  to  say,  a  man  has  power  even  in  himself, 
by  contract,  to  dispose  of  his  own  liberty  and  all  the  rights 
he  possesses.  Society  has  claims  on  him,  his  wife,  his  chil- 
dren, and  his  God,  which  he  cannot  cancel  by  selling  himself 
to  another.  Yes,  coming  generations  have  a  voice  in  the 
question.  He  has  no  more  right  to  sell  his  body  than  he  has 
to  commit  suicide,  for,  by  so  doing,  he  passes  from  manhood 
to  thing,  or  chattelhood,  and  becomes  a  piece  of  breathing 
property.  The  great  rights  of  manhood  are  not  given  to  us 
by  our  Creator,  to  give,  sell,  and  barter  away.  The  powers 
of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  cannot  be  re- 
signed to  a  power  inferior,  to  that  of  the  one,  from  ichom 
they  have  been  received. 

As  to  the  consideration  that  might  be  given  for  those  God- 
inherited  rights,  described  in  your  Constitution,  as  inaliena- 
ble, who  is  rich  enough  to  buy  them,  who  is  able  to  make 
title  to  them  ?  Suppose  that  some  Croesus  owned  this  con- 
tinent, and  the  mines  of  Golconda,  and  should  offer  them  to 
me  to  become  his  slave,  according  to  the  laws  of  South 
Carolina  and  Louisiana  ;  at  the  same  instant,  he  executes  for 
the  consideration  of  my  person,  a  deed  of  the  continent  and 
mines  to  me,  and  I  execute  to  him  a  deed  of  my  body.  The 
purchaser  of  me,  by  the  operation  of  the  slave  laws,  instantly 
becomes  repossessed  of  what  passed  to  me  by  grant,  under 
the  maxim  that  the  slave  and  all  he  hath,  or  may  find  or 
acquire,  belongeth  to  the  master,  therefore,  I  the  slave  would 
£ay,  that  the  consideration  having  failed,  and  by  operation  of 
law,  my  master  having  become  reseized  of  his  continent  and 
mines,  I  am  free  again.  Thus,  it  would  be  found  impossible 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEESEY.  293 

to  make  a  bargain  resting  upon  equity,  for  the  sale  of  one's 
person,  as  the  whole  subject  revolves  in  a  circle  of  never- 
ending  absurdities,  justice  leaving  the  parties  where  it  found 
them  :  man  with  equal  success  having  attempted  to  quadrate 
the  circle,  create  perpetual  motion,  and  make  a  contract  for 
the  sale  of  a  man,  by  his  own  agreement,  on  consideration  of 
value  for  value  received  by  the  slave  upon  the  principles  of 
slaveholding  law !  If  a  man  could  not  perform  the  act  of 
making  himself  a  slave,  how  could  another  do  it  for  him,  or  a 
State  or  a  government,  without  doing  an  act  repugnant  to 
that  law  of  nature  spoken  of  in  the  first  article  of  your  new 
Constitution? 

When  I  applied  for  these  writs  of  Habeas  Corpus  som 
days  since,  to  one  branch  of  this  court,  it  was  remarked  by 
one  member  of  the  court,  that  this  case  would  require  great 
consideration  from  its  eflfect  on  the  towns  of  this  State,  as  it 
might  subject  said  towns  to  the  maintenance  of  worn-out, 
aged  and  infirm  slaves,  in  the  shape  of  paupers.  That  con- 
tingency is  possible,  but  forms  no  ground  against  awarding 
to  the  bondmen  that  constitutional  justice,  so  long  withheld 
by  the  consent  of  these  towns,  as  well  as  the  avaricious 
masters.  It  was  argued  in  the  Somerset  case  by  Mr.  Dun- 
ning, the  counsel  of  the  claimant  of  Somerset,  that  if  this 
slave  was  set  free  by  the  judgment  of  the  court,  there  were 
then  at  large  fourteen  thousand  slaves  in  England,  belonging 
to  gentlemen  in  the  West  Indies,  who,  for  their  own  conve- 
nience, had  brought  them  to  England,  and  valuing  them  at 
£50  per  head,  they  would  amount  to  £700,000,  or  $3,500,000. 
What  was  the  memorable  reply  of  Lord  Mansfield  ?  It  was, 
"  that  a  man's  natural  relations  go  with  him  everywhere,  his 
municipal,  to  the  bounds  of  the  country  of  his  abode."  And 
in  answer  to  the  suggestion  of  a  loss  by  the  proprietors  of 
the  14,000  negro  slaves  in  England,  said  Lord  Mansfield, 
"  we  have  no  authority  to  regulate  the  conditions  on  which 


294:  ALVAN   STEWART. 

law  shatt  operate.  We  cannot  direct  the  law,  the  law  must 
direct  us." 

So,  the  argumentum  db  inconvenienti  should  not  apply  in 
this  case.  If  these  slaves  have  been  worn  out  by  the  consent 
of  the  public,  if  that  public  have  folded  their  arms  in  silence, 
and  witnessed  the  robbery  of  these  men,  from  year  to  year, 
of  their  earnings  (which  might  have  supported  them  in  the 
evening  of  life),  it  is  right  that  the  same  public  should  sup- 
port them  when  they  can  toil  no  more  in  the  enjoyment  of 
their  just  liberty.  For  it  is  always  dangerous  to  men  to  see 
liberty  struck  down  in  others,  and  because  they  do  not  taste 
its  bitterness  personally,  passively  to  look  on  without  resist- 
ance.  It  will  sooner  or  later  strike  back  on  themselves.  That 
man  is  not  worthy  of  liberty,  who  will  not  fly  to  the  rescue 
of  his  brother  when  he  sees  his  freedom  struck  down  or 
assailed.  Our  liberties  are  always  invaded  when  the  humblest 
individual  is  deprived  of  his,  without  our  making  all  the 
resistance  within  our  power. 

At  the  time  of  the  argument  of  the  Somerset  case,  in  1771, 
the  world  was  full  of  slavery,  especially  the  West  Indies,  and 
the  colonies  of  this  continent — it  was  tolerated  in  all.  But 
behold  what  may  be  done  by  the  indomitable  perseverance 
of  one  man,  if  that  man  be  Granville  Sharpe.  He  was  a 
gentleman  of  small  means,  but  of  a  great  heart,  and  had  for 
some  time  made  the  study  of  human  rights  a  subject  of  great 
consideration.  He  had  read,  thought,  and  written  in  their 
behalf,  and  was  the  prosecutor  who  interested  himself  for 
Somerset,  the  slave  of  one  William  Stuart,  a  West  India 
planter,  and  prepared  much  of  the  brief  of  Mr.  Hargrave, 
and  obtained  the  writ  of  habeas  corpus,  returnable  in  the 
Court  of  King's  Bench,  at  his  own  expense.  The  court 
heard  the  argument  patiently  the  live-long  day,  and  decided 
against  the  slave,  on  the  authority  of  a  case  in  1749,  in  Lord 
Hardwick's  and  Lord  Talbot's  time.  Nothing  discouraged 


SLAVERY   IN    NEW   JERSEY.  295 

Granville  Sharpe  ;  at  the  next  term  he  brought  up  Somerset 
a  second  time,  and  the  question  was  so  important,  that  the 
court  heard  the  argument  a  second  time,  and  decided,  as 
before,  against  the  slave.  Poor  Granville  Sharpe,  still 
contended  that  a  slave  "  could  not  breathe  in  England,"  and 
having  spent  some  months  in  deep  study,  upon  the  law  of 
England,  though  a  layman,  he  brought  up  Somerset  for  the 
third  time  before  the  Court  of  King's  Bench,  which  had  Lord 
Mansfield  for  its  chief,  who  did  not  meet  poor  Sharpe  and  his 
counsel  with  a  rebuke  for  his  unconquerable  fanaticism  and 
obstinacy,  nor  did  the  court  throw  down  the  common  im- 
pediment to  the  march  of  mind  and  further  consideration,  by 
saying  "  res  adjiidicata"  "  res  adjudicata  /"  No  !  where 
human  liberty  was  concerned,  or  the  great  rights  of  self-owner- 
ship staked  upon  human  reasoning  and  judicial  determination, 
Lord  Mansfield  was  not  in  haste  to  say  "  we  have  decided 
against  human  nature."  The  cause  was  argued  a  third  time 
for  a  day  in  Westminster  Hall,  and  Granville  Sharpe  had, 
since  the  last  argument,  descended  into  the  deepest  wells  of 
English  liberty  and  brought  up  a  draught  of  the  waters  of 
life,  liberty,  mercy,  and  law,  so  pure,  that  when  it  was  com- 
mended to  the  lips  of  the  judges,  they  were  made  wise,  the 
scales  Fell  from  their  eyes,  and  they  saw  in  its  length  and 
breadth  the  mighty  truth  beaming  on  the  forehead  of  justice 
herself—"  that  slaves  cannot  breathe  in  England,"  and  the 
light  of  that  day  has  shone  on  with  increasing  strength  and 
beauty,  until  we  can  now  say,  that  the  sun  which  never  sets 
upon  the  realms  of  the  British  Empire,  beholds  in  his  circuit 
through  the  heavens,  no  slave  to  crouch  beneath  her  vast 
illimitable  power. 

But  oh !  what  shall  we  say  of  the  sublime  humanity  of 
Lord  Mansfield  and  his  compeers,  who  were  not  afraid  to  con- 
fess they  had  been  wrong,  and  had  the  magnanimity  to  say  it 
before  a  slaveholding  age  ?  This  day  saw  the  longest  stride 


296  ALVAN    STEWART. 

which  British  greatness  ever  took  on  the  highway  of  human 
glory. 

"Would  to  heaven  that  all  courts  might  imitate  the  illus- 
trious example  in  administering  justice  in  the  sublime  humility, 
which  dignified  the  court  and  exalted  our  kind,  as  in  the  case 
of  Somerset !  The  great  principles  established  in  the  Somerset 
case  awakened  the  philanthropy  of  England,  and  put  forth 
its  strength  in  1783,  1788,  1792,  1796,  1797,  and  finally,  in 
1806,  was  successful  in  the  abolition  of  the  African  slave 
trade  by  Parliament.  "Wilberforce,  Pitt,  and  Fox  were  foiled 
again  and  again,  in  Parliament,  the  theatre  of  their  eloquence, 
and  seat  of  their  power,  but  justice  finally  prevailed.  This 
was  the  first  great  blow  struck  for  the  man  of  Africa,  in  three 
hundred  years,  from  the  beginning  of  his  American  and  West 
Indian  enslavement.  But  from  that  day,  the  vindication  of 
his  rights  has  been  onward.  Congress,  in  1 774,  recommended 
the  ceasing  of  the  African  slave  trade  in  December,  1775, 
but  it  was  not  abolished  untilJanuary,  1808,  by  a  law  passed 
the  March  before,  in  1807.  Three  acts  of  Congress  were 
passed  in  1814,  1820,  and  in  1824,  increasing  the  penalties 
against  transgressors,  until  it  finally  declared  that  all  who 
were  engaged  therein,  were  pirates,  and  subject  to  the  pirate's 
doom.  An  act  of  Congress  passed  in  1787,  declared  that 
involuntary  servitude,  or  slavery,  should  never  exist  in  the 
Northwestern  Territory,  comprising  the  present  States  of 
Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  Michigan,  and  the  territories  of  Wis- 
consin and  Iowa.  These  early  acts  of  national  legislation 
show  which  way  the  mind  of  the  nation  pointed  at  this  time. 

A  slave  is  a  rational  human  being,  endowed  with  volition 
and  understanding,  like  the  rest  of  mankind,  and  whatever 
he  lawfully  acquires  and  gains  possession  of,  by  finding  or 
otherwise,  is  the  acquirement  and  possession  of  his  master. 
—4  Dessaus.  266 ;  1  Stewart  Rep.  320.  Slaves  cannot 
contract  matrimony  ;  their  earnings  and  their  children  belong 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW  JERSEY.  297 

to  the  master. — Slave  Law.  Indians  are  held  as  slaves  in 
New  Jersey. — HalsteadJ's  Rep.  374. 

Behold  the  shameful  injustice  of  the  Law  of  Slavery. 

If  it  be  found  by  a  jury  on  inspection,  that  the  person 
claimed  to  be  a  slave  is  white,  the  claimant  must  prove  him 
a  slave  or  he  will  go  free ;  but  if  the  jury  find  the  person  to 
be  of  African  descent,  the  law  of  slavery  presumes  the  per- 
son a  sl»ve,  by  whomsoever  he  may  be  claimed,  and  the  bur- 
den is  thrown  on  the  alleged  slave  to  prove  a  negative — that 
he  is  not  a  slave. —  Wheeler's  Law  of  Slavery,  22.  The 
owner  of  a  female  slave  may  give  her  to  one  person,  and  the 
children  she  may  thereafter  have  to  another ! — Law  of  Sla- 
very, 2.  A  slave  cannot  be  a  witness  before  any  court  or 
jury  in  the  land,  against  a  free  white  for  the  greatest  injus- 
tice. This  is  one  of  its  most  horrible  features. 

Look  to  the  case  of  an  alien  white  child.  Suppose  her  to 
be  the  daughter  of  parents  of  the  lowest  class  of  those  who 
migrate  from  Ireland  to  America,  and  that  these  parents 
should  die  on  their  passage  over  the  Atlantic,  leaving  to  the 
mercy  of  New  Jersey  laws,  and  the  good  people  of  Perth 
Amboy,  their  daughter,  twelve  years  old,  who  cannot  read  or 
write,  barefooted,  destitute  and  friendless.  Under  your  laws, 
the  overseers  of  the  poor  bind  her  out,  to  the  mayor  of  Tren- 
ton ;  she  has  lived  with  this  rich,  popular  and  influential  citizen 
but  one  little  month,  when  by  violence,  she  is  dishonored  by 
her  master,  the  mayor.  Is  he  safe  from  the  retributions  of 
justice  ?  Is  she  deprived  of  her  oath  ?  No.  She  comes, 
friendless  and  lonely,  and  knocks  at  the  door  of  your  grand- 
jury  room.  Humble  and  feeble  as  is  that  knock,  it  is  quickly 
heard  by  the  acuteness  of  humanity's  ear.  She  enters  the 
vestibule  of  the  great  temple  of  justice,  and  immediately  the 
majesty  of  the  entire  law  of  the  land,  not  only  of  New 
Jersey,  but  of  this  vast  empire,  stands  in  its  mighty  invisi- 
bility around  for  her  protection,  ready  to  be  revealed  in  its 
13* 


298  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

power.  She  is  invited,  on  oath,  to  tell  the  story  of  her 
•wrongs,  the  indignant  grand-jurors  listen  and  believe,  and 
find  a  bill  against  the  mayor ;  she  goes  and  comes  under  the 
law's  broad  shield.  This  haughty  man  is  found  by  the  offi- 
cers of  the  law,  is  arrested  by  its  power,  and  brought  before 
a  court  to  plead  to  this  indictment.  He  is  tried ;  a  second  • 
time,  she,  the  friendless,  comes  and  tells  the  tale  of  her  dis- 
honor ;  confiding  justice,  humanity,  loving  and  honoring  men 
believe  her  story ;  he  is  convicted  and  attempts  to  fly  the 
power  of  the  State  and  Union,  which  is  by  that  child's  oath 
already  set  in  motion,  and  will  prevail  against  money  and 
mobs  of  rescue,  all  of  these  cannot  save  the  big  criminal 
from  the  vengeance  of  the  law ;  to  the  penitentiary  for  ten 
long  years,  he  must  and  does  go  ;  yes,  the  merciful  majesty 
of  the  law  shines  gloriously  on  the  head  of  the  friendless 
foreigner.  This  is  being  born  free  and  independent  by  the 
law  of  nature,  under  your  Constitution. 

But  not  so  of  the  poor  injured  slave,  man  or  woman,  native 
born  though  they  be,  however  cruel  or  terrible  the  wrong 
inflicted  on  them,  by  their  owner  or  other  free  man,  the 
slave  is  not  to  be  heard  to  tell  his  or  her  story,  however  true, 
before  any  human  tribunal  in  the  land  against  a  free  white 
person.  Is  this  being  free  and  independent  by  the  law  of 
nature  ?  Is  this  possessing  the  safety  and  happiness  described 
in  the  first  article  of  the  new  Constitution,  which  your  or- 
ganic law  declares  to  be  a  portion  of  all,  of  woman  born  ? 
Slavery  imports  perpetual  obligation  to  serve  another !  Does 
that  look  like  being  free  and  independent  ? 

Slavery,  is  so  abhorrent  to  all  justice  and  mercy,  that  all 
the  intendments  of  law  and  justice  are  opposed  to  it ;  so  that 
the  legal  writers  of  slave  countries  say  that  it  can  only  exist 
by  force  of  positive  law.  The  lex  scripta  must  be  its  founda- 
tion, and  that  I  think  you  no  longer  have.  The  lex  scripta 
must  be  the  source  of  all  of  that  mischievous  powe'r,  which 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  299 

one  human  being  can  exercise  over  another,  by  making  a 
fellow-being  his  slave,  his  chattel.  The  foundation  of  slavery 
which  sprang  up  in  our  colonies,  had,  as  a  general  rule, 
nothing  but  the  barbarous  custom  of  a  few  inhuman  planters, 
in  its  origin,  which  custom  was  one  within  legal  memory, 
and  ran  not  back  to  that  unsurveyed  point  of  antiquity,  trans- 
cending all  human  memory,  where  its  source  was  hidden  in 
the  night  of  by-gone  ages.  It  has  not  that  common  law 
authority  for  its  support,  which  was  supposed  to  be  handed 
down  from  generation  to  generation,  in  the  libraries  of 
judges  and  lawyers,  as  copies,  as  some  conjecture,  of  obso- 
lete, worn-out  and  extinct  statutes.  As  the  soul  survives 
the  body,  so  it  is  supposed  these  customs  called  common  law, 
are  the  souls  or  spirits  of  departed  statutes,  the  tombstones 
and  graves  of  which  can  no  longer  be  found.  Cineres  peri- 
erunt.  But  their  imperishable  souls  still  remain  to  guide 
and  direct  us  on  the  journey  of  life,  and  as  far  as  they  speak  in 
the  language  of  authority  over  this  land,  they  forbid  in  trum- 
pet tongues,  the  existence  of  this  vile  institution  of  slavery. 

Institution  of  slavery  !  Institution  of  horse-stealing,  insti- 
tution of  gambling,  and  the  institutions  of  highwaymen, 
sound  equally  sensible,  to  a  just  and  philosophical  thinker. 
But  slavery  is  within  the  memory  of  men,  so  far  as  its  advent 
to  the  new  world  is  concerned.  We  track  it  from  the 
middle  passage  to  this  hour,  from  its  first  unholy  foot-print 
at  Jamestown  to  the  last  ones  made  this  day  by  those  now 
held  in  New  Jersey ;  and  if  the  court  finds,  existing,  a  well- 
grounded  doubt  as  to  the  authority  for  this  institution  which 
is  trying  to  nestle  down  on  our  soil,  and  is  taking  rank  with 
your  scientific,  religious  and  agricultural  institutions,  then 
give  humanity  the  advantage  of  that  doubt,  and  put  the  sys- 
tem to  death.  As  between  strength  and  weakness,  power 
and  imbecility,  if  a  strong  doubt  arise  in  the  minds  of  the 
judges,  the  mercy  of  the  law  says,  decide  in  favor  of  imbe- 


300  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

cility  and  weakness  ;  "  those  who  are  ready  to  perish,"  let 
their  blessing  come  upon  you.  Every  intendment  is  in  favor 
of  natural  rights,  until  the  contrary  doth  most  manifestly 
appear.  If  the  new  Constitution  has  seriously  drawn  in  ques- 
tion the  villainies  and  crimes  of  this  complicated  institution 
of  wrong,  then  this  court,  acting  within  the  spirit  and  scope 
of  American  institutions,  are  bound  to  give  the  slave  the 
benefit  of  that  doubt  and  set  him  free.  A  solid  doubt  should 
secure  emancipation.  But  thanks  to  the  freemen  of  New 
Jersey,  the  court  is  not  obliged  to  look  through  clouds  to  see 
the  clear  sky  of  Liberty  beyond,  for  its  Constitution,  in  its 
first  section,  asserts  in  the  strongest  form  of  the  English 
language,  the  explicit  principles  put  forth  in  the  Declaration 
of  Independence,  when  our  country  was  introduced  into  the 
family  of  nations,  by  which  we  declared  the  great  self-evident 
truth  to  be,  that  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and 
possessed  of  certain  inalienable  rights,  among  which  are  life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  which  is  the  proposition 
of  the  Constitution  of  New  Jersey,  expressed  so  distinctly, 
that  cavil  itself  looks  on  in  humble  silence,  and  hangs  his 
head  in  mute  despair.  For  these  great  man-rights,  as  I  have 
said,  there  is  no  buyer,  no  seller,  no  market.  They  are  a 
trust  confided  to  man  by  his  Maker,  in  order  to  place  him  at 
the  head  of  the  created  life,  and  give  him  dominion  over  it ; 
and  his  rank  he  can  never  sell,  lose,  or  forfeit  so  as  to  take  his 
station  as  property  among  the  quadrupeds  and  animals.  In 
the  fall  of  Adam  man  never  fell  so  low  as  the  slaveholder 
would  have  wished ;  for,  according  to  the  law  of  slavery,  the 
poor  slave  in  the  disastrous  fall  of  the  first  transgression 
"  which  brought  death  into  the  world,  and  all  our  woes," 
fell  out  of  his  manhood  into  chattelhood,  and  fell  on  till 
he  lost  his  wife,  his  children,  and  in  the  amazing  descent  as 
he  further  fell,  he  lost  all  his  property,  and  all  he  should 
thereafter  acquire;  and  as  he  further  fell,  he  himself  became 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  301 

property,  and  brought  not  up  on  solid  ground,  until  he  could 
say  to  the  neighing  horse,  on  the  one  hand,  "  thou  art,  as  pro- 
perty, my  brother,"  and  to  the  lowing  ox,  on  the  other, 
"thou  art  my  equal,  my  peer."  Such  is  the  slaveholder's 
construction  of  the  fall,  but  this  is  one  of  man's  pit-falls,  and 
not  one  of  his  Maker's. 

Mr.  S.  said  he  had  an  argument,  which  the  court  might 
regard  as  novel,  which  he  wished  to  urge — that  each  and 
every  branch  of  our  government,  state  or  national,  were 
under  a  most  solemn  covenant  with  one  of  the  great  nations 
of  the  earth,  to  use  our  best  endeavors  to  abolish  slavery,  in 
every  part  of  our  countiy ;  and  we  have  been  living  under 
the  weight  of  that  solemn  and  disregarded  undertaking  for 
the  last  thirty  years.  I  understand  a  treaty  made  by  the 
treaty-making  power  to  be  the  solemn  and  paramount  law  of 
this  land,  and  if  I  am  right  in  its  construction,  the  duty  is 
imposed  upon  our  nation,  and  I  may  well  urge  it  even  upon 
the  judiciary  of  this  State,  as  a  coordinate  branch  of  the 
government,  to  employ  all  the  power  it  constitutionally  may 
possess,  by  its  decision,  to  fulfill  this  engagement  of  the  nation. 

The  article  to  which  I  refer,  is  the  10th  article  of  the 
treaty  of  Ghent,  of  the  24th  December,  1814,  made  by  the 
United  States  of  America  on  the  one  side,  and  his  Britannic 
Majesty  on  the  other.  Lest  there  should  be  some  attempt  to 
cavil,  and  pretend  this  article  of  the  treaty  had  reference  to 
the  African  slave  trade,  I  may  be  allowed  to  say  there  is  not 
one  word  in  the  treaty,  except  in  the  10th  article,  which 
touches  or  relates  to  the  subject  of  slavery,  and  it  is  an 
engagement  relating  to  slavery  as  to  the  traffic  generally  in 
the  two  countries,  for  each  had  abolished  the  African  slave 
trade  under  the  most  tremendous  penalties  long  before  1814 ; 
therefore  the  treaty  referred  to  slavery  generally  in  the  two 
countries.  The  words  of  the  10th  section  of  the  treaty  of 
Ghent  are  as  follows : 


302  ALVJLN    STEWART. 

"  10th  Article.  Whereas  the  traffic  hi  slaves  is  irreconcila- 
ble with  the  principles  of  humanity  and  justice,  and  whereas 
both  his  Majesty,  and  the  United  States  are  desirous  of  con- 
tributing their  efforts  to  promote  its  entire  abolition,  it  is 
hereby  agreed  that  both  the  contracting  parties  shall  use 
their  best  endeavors  to  accomplish  so  desirable  an  object. 

"  Signed  24<A  December,  1814. 

"  GAMBIER, 
HENEY  GOULBUEN, 
WILLIAM:  ADAMS, 

JOHX  QUIXCY  ADAMS, 
(«  Done  in  triplicate.)  j  A 


H.  CLAY, 

JONATHAN  RUSSEL, 
ALBERT  GALLAITN." 
United  States  Laws,  1st  vol.,  699. 

This  treaty,  so  long  dishonored  on  our  part,  has  been  most 
faithfully  respected  and  obeyed  on  the  part  of  Great  Britain. 
They  immediately  began  to  adopt  means  for  the  subversion 
of  slavery  as  a  system  hi  the  West  Indies.  To  be  sure  the 
violence,  disorder,  and  lynch  law  of  the  slaveholders  of  the 
West  Indies  defeated  the  kindness,  and  deferred  the  approach- 
ing justice  of  the  English  nation  for  some  years.  It  was 
astonishing  to  see  the  impudence  of  the  West  India  planters 
threatening  dismemberment  of  the  empire,  revolution,  and 
treason,  as  often  as  the  mother  country  originated  a  measure 
in  any  degree  preparatory  to  emancipation.  These  contuma- 
cious slaveholders  did  all  in  their  power  to  frighten  England 
from  her  high  purposes,  1st,  by  asserting  that  the  slaves 
would  cut  their  master's  throats  if  emancipated  ;  2d,  that  the 
slaves  were  so  brutified,  they  would  all  starve  to  death,  and 
die  from  laziness,  and  could  not  take  care  of  themselves  ; 
that  the  slaves  were  thieves  and  drunkards  ;  that  the  whites 
would  have  to  abandon  the  island  if  they  were  set  free,  and 


SLAVEBY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  303 

lose  their  estates ;  in  fact  that  slaves  were  not  men,  and  had 
no  souls.  Amalgamation,  house-burning,  and  universal  deso- 
lation would  be  the  first  fruits  of  such  procedure. 

The  Moravian,  Baptist  and  Methodist  ministers  exposed 
themselves  to  great  rage  from  the  slaveholders  in  attempting, 
as  Christian  ministers  and  good  subjects,  to  preach  the  Gos- 
pel to  the  slaves,  and  aid  them  in  information,  and  in  further- 
ing the  objects  of  the  mother  country.  Baptist  and  Metho- 
dist meeting-houses  or  churches  were  torn  down  and  burnt, 
and  these  blessed  ministers  were  in  constant  peril  of  losing 
their  lives,  and  were  occasionally  imprisoned  and  banished 
from  their  homes  and  families.  In  fact,  everything,  which 
is  said  against  emancipation  and  abolitionists  in  Mississippi, 
Georgia,  and  South  Carolina,  was  said  in  the  British  West 
Indies  thousands  and  thousands  of  times  by  the  press,  reso- 
lutions of  public  meetings,  the  Island  Legislatures,  and  the 
voice  of  man,  against  emancipation  and  British  abolitionists ; 
but  om  the  passage  of  the  great  Reform  Bill  of  England  in 
1833,  about  500,000  new  law-makers  or  voters  were  added 
to  the  old  parliamentary  constituency  of  England,  and  when 
this  fresh  stream  of  popular  power  flowed,  it  rose  so  high, 
that  on  the  bosom  of  its  flood  it  carried  into  the  new  Par- 
liament men  deeply  sympathizing  with  the  great  principles 
of  justice,  and  one  of  their  first  act  of  legislation  was  to 
declare  slavery  abolished  in  the  West  Indies,  paying  £20,- 
000,000  sterling  to  the  slaveholders,  and  giving  them,  the 
masters,  six  years  more  the  service  of  the  slaves,  so  that 
emancipation  would  not  take  place  until  the  first  of  August, 
1840.  This  apprenticeship  system,  regulated  by  a  most  com- 
plicated law,  with  especial  justices  to  stand  between  master 
and  apprentice,  proved,  if  possible,  more  bitter  than  slavery 
itself.  Nothing  could  have  been  more  unfortunate,  or  fraught 
with  greater  injustice  to  the  colored  people. 

The  master's  avarice  and  cruelty  arose  in  proportion  to  the 


304  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

shortness  of  the  time  that  he  could  exercise  his  despotism. 
The  special  justices  intended  for  the  slave  apprentice's  friend, 
eat  sumptuous  dinners  with  the  planter,  and  decided  contro- 
versies in  his  favor.  The  humanity  of  the  government  in  the 
apprenticeship  system,  was  entirely  defeated  by  the  greedi- 
ness, cruelty,  and  avarice  of  masters.  The  horrid  flogging, 
the  treadmills,  and  other  instruments  of  slaveholding  ven- 
geance and  torture  were  in  full  play  during  the  probationary 
state.  The  mother  country  had  been  overreached  in  paying 
twenty  millions  of  pounds  sterling  to  see  the  objects  of  their 
solicitude  so  shamefully  treated.  The  mistake  of  the  home 
government  was  in  supposing  it  possible  to  ingraft  a  system 
of  apprenticeship,  education,  and  a  preparation  for  freedom, 
on  the  old  tree  of  slavery,  and  in  having  confidence  in  those 
brutal,  cruel,  and  avaricious  slaveholders,  who,  with  their 
twenty  millions  of  pounds,  and  six  years  of  labor,  only  hated 
the  poor  slave  the  more  as  his  liberty  advanced  day  by  day 
in  his  chains.  Finally,  in  January  or  February,  1836,  the 
British  minister  wrote  to  the  governors  of  these  islands, 
requesting  them  in  the  coming  spring  and  summer  to  convoke 
those  insular  legislatures  and  ask  them  forthwith  to  abolish 
the  remaining  two  years  of  the  apprenticeship  system,  if  the 
islands  wished  for  the  future  good  will  of  the  slaves,  or  in 
fact,  the  protection  of  the  parent  country,  in  case  of  insur- 
rection. This  stringent  measure  brought  the  obstinate  slave- 
holders to  their  senses.  The  West  India  Island  parliaments 
were  convoked,  and  the  final  acts  of  emancipation  passed,  to 
take  effect  simultaneously  on  the  1st  of  August,  1838,  except 
the  island  of  Antigua,  whose  parliament,  with  great  good 
sense,  abolished  slavery  and  apprenticeship  both,  in  1834,  in 
an  island  of  30,000  blacks,  and  5,000  whites — six  to  one. 
Great  kindness,  love,  education  and  prosperity  followed  this 
island.  However,  the  eventful  first  of  August,  1838,  at  last 
came,  and  instead  of  blood  and  insurrection,  as  prophesied  by 


SLAVEEY   IN    NEW   JERSEY.  305 

the  selfish  and  cowardly,  the  blacks  throughout  the  British 
West  Indies,  to  the  number  of  800,000  human  beings,  who 
had  been  slaves,  met  in  the  evening  of  the  31st  of  July,  1838, 
and  there  continued  in  a  solemn  and  quiet  manner  until  the 
moment  of  midnight  came,  when  the  bells  of  the  churches  of 
the  British  West  Indies  struck  and  played  from  island  to 
island,  while  cannon  were  roaring  throughout  the  great 
Antilles — they  were  the  glorious  peals  of  freedom,  the  joyful 
freed  men  raising  notes  of  thanksgiving  and  praise  to  heaven 
from  bended  knees,  falling  with  hysteric  transports  of  wild 
and  delirious  joy,  into  each  other's  arms.  No  mortal  tongue 
or  pen  can  describe  the  overflowing  ecstasies  of  these  naked 
and  scourged  bondmen,  now  standing  up  as  British  freemen — 
slaves  no  more. .  They  sung,  they  cried,  they  danced,  and 
thus  in  wild  and  rapturous  joy  they  passed  the  terrific  bourne 
so  long  wished  for  by  them — so  long  feared  and  dreaded  by 
the  guilty  white  man.  But  the  first  drop  of  the  white  man's* 
blood  has  not  yet  been  shed,  by  this  deeply  abused  and 
emancipated  people.  Many  thousands  of  these  long-injured 
people  are  now  proprietors  of  two,  four,  eight,  ten,  and  fifteen 
acres  of  land.  Their  wives  and  children  stay  at  home  and 
cultivate  and  raise  enough  for  the  family's  food  and  clothing ; 
the  father  works,  or  some  older  sons,  on  some  neighboring 
plantation — the  money  he  or  they  earn  pays  for  land : — his 
wife  and  children  create  subsistence  from  his  own  fields. 
Hundreds  of  schools  and  many  churches,  have  sprung  up  for 
the  adults  and  colored  children.  Once  the  planters  raised 
nothing  but  sugar,  molasses,  rum,  and  coffee,  and  bought  all 
their  provisions  from  abroad  ;  now  the  laborers'  families  raise 
provisions  on  the  island.  Less  sugar,  to  be  sure,  is  raised, 
but  two-thirds  of  the  sugar  goes,  as  a  money  question,  further 
now  than  all  did  in  slavery,  as  more  than  one-third,  some- 
times one-half,  was  spent  for  provisions  which  are  now  raised 
at  home.  So  they  have  gone  on  with  remarkable  prosperity, 


306  AiVAN    STEWART. 

both  master  and  freedmen.  The  plantations  have  risen, 
some  twenty,  thirty,  and  others  forty  and  fifty,  and  many 
sixty  and  sixty-five  per  cent,  above  their  slave  value.  In  fact, 
the  English  government  now  feel  that  they  acted  unwisely 
in  giving  the  twenty  millions  of  pounds ;  for  the  lands  alone 
of  those  slave  islands  are  now  worth  more  than  slaves  and 
land  both  were  in  1830.  Indeed  it  is  a  matter  of  regret  now, 
that  the  slave  had  not  received  what  England  had  to  give. 

On  the  same  day,  the  fetters  fell  from  the  slaves  of  South 
Africa;  from  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  six  hundred  miles 
north,  inland,  the  institution  expired  on  the  last  acre  of 
British  supremacy — from  ocean  to  ocean.  On  the  1st  of 
April,  1844,  England,  by  her  East  India  Company's  mighty 
powers,  struck  slavery  dead  through  her  Oriental  regions — 
twelve  millions  of  slaves,  serfs,  and  caste — crushed  beings, 
lifted  their  unfettered  hands  to  God  to  bless  his  power,  and 
that  of  England's,  which,  amidst  a  population  of  one  hundred 
millions  of  Eastern  Indies,  left  them  in  chains  to  pine  no  more. 
Has  not  England  most  gloriously,  in  thirty  years,  from  1814 
to  1844,  performed  her  high  and  glorious  undertaking  with 
these  United  States  in  the  treaty  of  Ghent  ?  Has  she  not 
blotted  out  that  great  dishonor  of  our  race  from  her  vast 
dominions?  What  have  we  done  to  fulfill  our  part  of  this 
great  national  covenant  ?  When  the  Abolitionists  presented 
from  year  to  year,  petitions  clothed  in  dignified  and  respect- 
ful language,  praying  Congress  to  abolish  the  internal 
slave  trade  between  the  States,  in  the  Territory  of  Florida, 
and  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  signed  by  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  names,  unread,  undebated,  imprinted,  and  uncon- 
sidered,  they  were  laid  upon  the  table.  This  being  esteemed 
too  a  great  a  privilege  for  humanity,  during  three  years, 
these  petitions,  by  a  rule  of  the  House  of  Representa- 
tives, were  forbidden  a  reception  by  the  House.  The 
Abolitionists,  for  endeavoring  to  fulfill  the  paramount  law  of 


SLAVERY   IN    NEW   JERSEY.  307 

the  land,  the  10th  article  of  the  treaty,  were  defamed  in 
Congress  and  out,  their  names  cast  out  as  fanatical  and 
incendiary,  they  were  mobbed  by  the  countenance  of  men  in 
high  places,  their  churches  destroyed,  their  halls  burnt,  and 
their  people  imprisoned  and  murdered  !  If  slavery  not  only 
forbids  and  restrains  a  nation  from  performing  its  most 
solemn  treaties,  but  violates  them,  and  thus  endangers  the 
peace,  prosperity,  and  happiness  of  the  whole  people,  can  it 
be  doubted  that  it  contravenes  the  1st  article  of  your  Consti- 
tution, which  assures  us  that  man  has  the  right  of  "  acquiring, 
possessing,  and  protecting  property,  and  of  pursuing,  and  of 
obtaining  safety  and  happiness." 

Can  safety,  property,  and  happiness  be  maintained  by  men 
or  nations  who  violate  faith,  who  are  truce-breakers  ?  Is 
not  that  slavery  which  hazards  the  peace  of  the  nation  by  re- 
fusing obedience  to  the  highest  law  of  individual  and  national 
preservation,  something  that  is  contrary  to  the  great  law  of 
nature?  Every  branch  of  our  government  —  legislative, 
judicial  or  executive — should  have  lent  every  encouragement 
and  aid  in  their  power  to  the  removal  of  this  cancer,  batten- 
ing with  its  roots  in  the  jugulars  of  the  Republic.  But  in- 
stead of  presidential  and  gubernatorial  messages  urging  Con- 
gress and  the  State  legislatures,  under  this  standing  para- 
mount treaty-law,  to  do  all  in  their  power  within  their  re- 
spective jurisdictions  to  abolish  slavery,  slavery  has  mounted 
the  highest  places  of  power,  and  has  rescinded  and  annulled 
the  treaty,  and  compelled  presidents  and  governors,  by  mes- 
sages and  inaugurals  to  forewarn  the  legislative  assemblies 
and  the  people  to  violate  this  treaty,  and  turn  their  entire 
power  and  legislative  action  against  those  who  had  petitioned 
for  the  abolition  of  slavery.  Is  not  this  high  treason  against 
the  State  and  man's  best  interests  ?  Has  not  slavery  caused 
these  high  dignitaries  to  commit  official  perjury?  And  is 
not  such  a  terrible  institution  hostile  to  man,  his  safety  and 


308  ALVAN   STEWART. 

happiness  as  a  man  and  as  a  citizen,  and  is  it  not  within  the 
inhibition  of  the  first  section  of  your  Constitution,  and  does 
it  not  violate  that  freedom  and  independence  conferred  upon 
him  by  the  laAV  of  nature,  and  does  it  not  stand  between  you 
and  the  enjoyment  of  the  first  article  ? 

What  is  that  law  of  nature  by  which  all  men  are  made 
free  and  independent  ?  Allow  me  to  define  it  as  I  under- 
stand it.  The  law  of  nature  is  that  great  omnipotent  law  of 
God,  ever  in  full  force  amidst  the  busy  hum  of  thousands  in 
your  emporium,  or  in  the  solitudes  of  the  wilderness,  on  the 
sea,  or  on  the  land  ;  it  follows  man  down  into  the  mines  of 
the  earth,  it  ascends  with  him  to  the  Chimborazo's  top  ;  it  has 
no  latitude,  no  longitude,  no  length,  no  breadth ;  it  is  truth, 
and  is  as  earnest  in  its  pleadings,  amidst  the  inhospitalities  of 
polar  cold,  as  in  the  boundless  prodigalities  of  the  burning 
tropics ;  it  is  the  everlasting  justice  and  mercy  of  the  Eternal ; 
it  is  the  great  imprint  of  God  upon  man,  which  can  never  be 
counterfeited,  erased,  or  repealed;  it  is  so  immutable  that  it 
never  changes,  man  cannot  repeal  it ;  it  is  a  part  of  each  hu- 
man being's  inheritance,  which,  without  crime  he  can  never 
spend  or  squander;  it  abides  with  him,  though  unhonored, 
under  all  circumstances  of  bereavement,  and  guarantees  man's 
right  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness  as  inalienable. 
The  law  of  nature  is  taken  up  and  recognized  by  the  good 
people  of  New  Jersey,  in  the  most  solemn  form  as  a  rule  of 
action,  in  her  organic  law.  This  first  section  declares  that 
amongst  man's  inalienable  rights  are  life,  liberty,  and  the 
right  of  acquiring  property.  What,  can  a  slave  have  safety, 
or  acquire  property?  he  who  is  nothing  but  a  chattel,  a 
piece  of  property  himself,  can  he  acquire  safety  ?  No  ;  of 
all  the  innumerable  murders  committed  by  white  men  and 
women  upon  the  slaves  of  the  South  (and  there  is  no  day 
goes  by  in  which  there  is  not  more  than  one  murder  in  each 
slave  State,  on  an  average),  not  a  single  white  person  has 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW  JERSEY.  309 

yet  been  executed  for  the  murder  of  the  colored  man.  The 
white  is  frequently  hung  in  the  slave  States  for  stealing 
slaves,  but  not  for  killing  them.  Oh,  sum  of  all  human  vil- 
lainies, let  the  curse  of  God  rest  upon  it,  let  every  wind  of 
heaven  be  charged  with  its  destruction,  every  rising  sun  be 
its  destroyer,  the  rolling  seasons  its  executioner ! 

Slavery  is  the  exact  converse  of  every  proposition  con- 
tained in  the  first  article  of  your  new  Constitution. 

Slavery  throws  down  every  human  right  in  the  market 
to  the  highest  bidder.  If  slavery  (or  semi-slavery,  in 
the  shape  of  children  of  slaves,  in  this  State  continuing 
to  be  slaves,  males  until  twenty-five,  and  females  until 
twenty-one  years  of  age,  and  this  operation  is  to  pass 
under  the  name  of  being  born  free,  and  persons  forty-one 
years  old  and  upward  be  retained  as  slaves  for  life),  and 
slaveholders  are  to  stand  asserting  their  wicked  power,  then 
the  first  great  section  of  your  Constitution  is  converted  into 
a  vapid  and  senseless  abstraction.  Shall  your  Constitution 
be  withered  by  the  power  of  slavery  ?  Shall  this  Constitu- 
tion stand  gilt  with  the  gold  of  high  pretension,  while  within 
it  is  full  of  ravening  and  dead  men's  bones  ?  Shall  this  slave 
institution  continue  to  exist  in  hostility  to  so  plain  a  provi- 
sion ?  This  frightful  institution  claims  to  exist,  by  the  apo- 
logy of  some,  since  the  2d  of  last  September,  even  since  this 
Constitution  went  into  operation,  without  a  platform  on 
which  to  place  its  accursed  feet.  The  best  foundation  I  can 
see  for  slavery  in  this  State,  at  this  time,  and  the  length  of 
time  it  should  continue,  should  be  the  amount  of  time  it 
would  take  the  people  of  this  State  to  recover  from  their 
astonishment  at  its  inexpressible  impudence. 

The  institution  of  slavery  is  the  converse  proposition  of  the 
Ten  Commandments— it  is  the  essence  of  injustice  and  mean- 
ness in  its  most  compact  form ;  and  it  would  seem  that  no 
nation  not  struck  down  by  a  mortal  paralysis,  would  wait  a 


310  AJLVAN   8TEWAUT. 

moment  before  rising  and  felling  the  monster,  the  first  in- 
stant they  discovered  his  seven  heads  and  ten  horns  emerg- 
ing from  the  forlorn  regions  of  "  Eldest  Hell." 

Which  shall  stand — the  great  written,  organic  law  of 
liberty,  or  the  unwritten  and  inexpressible  villainy  of 
slavery  ?  "Which  shall  stand — the  natural  God-inherited 
rights  of  life,  liberty,  property,  safety,  and  happiness  for  each 
human  being  in  New  Jersey,  or  that  of  an  institution  which 
subverts  every  object  for  which  a  good  constitution  was  ever 
made? 

A  constitution,  ex  vi  termini,  imports  a  covenant  made  by 
the  whole  people,  with  each  person,  and  by  each  person  with 
the  whole  people,  to  protect  and  defend  their  God-inherited 
rights  of  life,  liberty,  property,  and  safety  from  violence  and 
invasion.  A  constitution  is  made  for  the  defence  of  human 
rights,  and  not  for  their  destruction ;  a  constitution  is  the 
highest  evidence  of  man's  weakness ;  and  intended  to  com- 
bine society's  strength  for  the  defence  of  each  individual. 
How  is  it  possible  that  a  constitution,  whether  of  this  State, 
or  of  the  United  States,  which  was  created  on  purpose  for 
the  protection  of  life,  liberty,  property,  and  safety,  can  exist 
and  be  entitled  to  the  name,  without  overthrowing  every  in- 
stitution, villainy  or  stratagem  created  or  made,  intending  to 
cheat  man  out  of  life,  liberty,  property,  safety,  and  happiness  ? 

The  men  who  framed  the  old  State  Constitution  of  New 
Jersey,  in  the  year  1776,  were  not  such  hypocrites  as  to 
stamp  that  Constitution  with  the  protection  of  human  rights. 
No,  they  said  nothing  on  that  subject,  for  they  knew  there 
was  no  inconsiderable  class  of  the  population  of  this  State 
who  were  wedded  to  the  insatiable  desire  of  appropriating 
the  labor  of  others,  without  compensation,  by  compelling 
negroes,  mulattoes,  mustees,  and  Indians,  to  work  for  them 
for  nothing,  and  make  chattels  or  property  of  their  persons, 
their  wives  and  children — yes,  of  those  human  sinews,  as  a 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  311 

marketable  commodity,  men  were  to  be  degraded  and  for- 
bidden, under  penalties  of  thirty-nine  lashes,  from  wandering 
from  their  masters'  homes  on  Sunday,  for  the  infliction  of 
which  stripes,  by  the  order  of  a  justice  of  the  peace,  a  con- 
stable did,  and  yet  does  receive  from  the  master  the  sum  of 
$1  for  performing  the  brutish  service.  To  add  to  all  other 
ignoble  acts  on  the  part  of  the  State,  was  a  provision  forbid- 
ding emancipatioa  of  the  slave,  if  forty  years  old  or  more,  for 
fear  of  the  distant  contingency,  that  this  freedman  might  be- 
come a  public  burden  to  the  township,  by  being  a  pauper  in 
his  old  age ;  and  rather  than  subject  the  towns  to  that,  they 
preferred  to  let  the  man  and  his  posterity  remain  in  slavery. 
Such  was  the  gross  inhumanity  of  the  age  ;  thus  cheap  were 
human  rights  held  by  the  people  of  this  State  "at  large. 
Gross  inhumanity  to  the  master  himself;  it  took  away  his 
locus  penitently  his  space  of  repentance.  And  if  slavery  is 
not  abolished,  this  infamous  provision  is  still  in  full  force.  The 
reason  why  slavery  was  not  abolished  by  name  in  Massachu- 
setts and  New  Jersey  is  to  be  found  in  this,  that  the  con- 
scious shame  of  the  fact  restrained  the  framers  of  those  con- 
stitutions from  immortalizing  their  own  disgrace  by  ad- 
mitting slavery's  previous  existence,  in  and  by  its  distinct 
abolition.  They  therefore  put  it  to  death  by  suffocation  by 
the  hands  of  liberty,  without  a  name,  hoping  the  judiciaries 
would  attend  its  funeral  and  burial,  and  forever  remove  its 
unsightly  corpse  from  the  sight  and  smell  of  men,  with  as 
little  parade  as  possible ;  and  further  hoping  that  a  generous 
posterity  would  disbelieve  their  early  public  history,  and 
consider  it  as  apocryphal  and  slanderous  of  their  illustrious 
ancestors,  as  the  constitutions  of  these  States  do  not  so 
much  as  name  so  great  a  moral  blemish  on  their  historical 
fame. 

Said  Mr.  S.,  by  the  statute  of  this  State  (which  he  con- 
tended was  repealed  by  the  first  section  of  the  new  Constitu- 


312  ALVAN   STEWART. 

tion)  passed  February,  1820,  all  children  born  of  slaves  after 
1804  were  to  be  free,  but  were  to  belong  as  servants,  and  to 
be  held  as  apprentices,  and  bound  out  by  the  overseers  of  the 
poor  to  the  owners  of  their  mothers,  their  administrators, 
executors  and  assigns— males  till  25,  and  females  until  21. 
These  persons  were  property  in  every  sense  of  the  word, 
until  their  time  expired ;  they  are  purchased  and  sold  in 
private  and  at  public  auction,  pass  under  the  insolvent  acts 
and  bankrupt  acts,  the  same  as  oxen  and  horses.  "What  is 
the  difference  between  this  Mary  Tebout  and  her  mother  ? 
Nothing,  until  Mary  has  passed  21  years  of  unrewarded  toil. 
She  is  called  a  servant,  she  is  said  to  be  born  free,  is  now  but 
19,  and  has  been  sold  three  times.  The  southern  States  call 
slavery  involuntary  servitude,  or  persons  bound  to  service  by 
the  laws  of  the  States.  The  domestic  institutions  of  the 
South,  the  patriarchal  institutions  and  the  peculiar  institu- 
tions of  the  South — by  such  soft  hypocritical  use  of  words, 
do  they  mean  to  make  the  English  language  a  partner  in  their 
guilt,  by  using  it  as  a  cloak  to  conceal  the  hideous  visage  of 
that  frightful  monster,  whose  mouth  is  filled  with  spikes,  and 
face  covered  with  iron  wrinkles,  with  burning  balls  of  fire  for 
eyes,  whose  every  hair  is  a  hissing  serpent,  whose  fetid  breath 
would  kill  the  Bohun  Upas,  whose  touch  is  ruin,  whose  em- 
brace is  destruction,  who  is  fed  on  blood,  tears  and  sweat, 
whip-extracted,  from  unpaid  toil — her  music  is  unpitied 
groans  of  broken  hearts,  of  ruined  hopes,  and  blasted  expec- 
tations. 

Away  with  such  artifice  to  shield  deformity,  by  those  cruel 
and  wicked  States,  boasting  of  their  republicanism,  and  rights 
of  man.  Even  New  York  and  Pennsylvania  once  held  per- 
sons born  free,  whose  mothers  were  slaves,  the  males  till  28, 
and  females  till  25,  as  slaves.  Terrible  nick-naming  of  human 
rights,  as  in  bold  derision  of  them.  These  New  Jersey 
servants  are  property,  in  its  base  sense,  slaves  for  years,  the 


SLALERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  313 

parents  deprived  of  all  jurisdiction  of  their  offspring,  all 
direction  of  their  education,  and  paternal  tenderness ;  the  law 
confining  these  poor  servants,  and  obliging  them  to  live  with 
those  who  have  owned  and  abused  the  mother  who  bore 
them,  and  are  still  continuing  to  hold  their  parents  until 
death,  as  slaves.  The  master  can  sell  his  servant  and  horse 
together.  This  servant- woman  at  15,  and  the  male-servant 
at  18,  contract  marriage,  and  when  the  woman  is  19,  and 
man  22  years  of  age,  having  three  little  children,  the  father  is 
sold  to  one  end  of  the  State,  and  the  mother  to  th^e  other ; 
their  little  children  left  in  the  street,  the  marriage  relation 
broken,  the  paternal  and  maternal  relation  dissolved ;  these 
little  ones  not  to  see  their  parents  for  two  years  or  more  ;  the 
husband  cannot  see  his  wife  or  little  ones,  nor  the  wife  her 
husband  or  babies  for  two  years  to  come.  Call  you  this  being 
"bora,  free?  The  man  is  deprived  of  his  wife,  and  the  wife 
becomes  a  widow,  and  children  orphans,  according  to  law, 
to  satisfy  the  claims  of  certain  old  slaveholders  in  this  State  ! 
Is  this  being  bom  free  ?  This  looks  none  like  respect  for  the 
law  of  nature,  by  which  we  are  born  free  and  independent. 
We  can  never  honor  or  respect  the  new  Constitution,  till  we 
feel  there  is  meaning,  power,  vitality,  in  those  blessed  words 
of  justice,  truth,  mercy,  freedom,  safety ;  and  further,  feel 
that  there  are  no  birth-impediments,  or  interest  of  others  in 
the  use  of  our  bodies,  inconsistent  with  our  own  happiness. 
Each  individual  should  be  left  to  fulfill  the  object  of  his  mis- 
sion to  this  world  in  the  best  way  he  may ;  society  should 
not  load  him  with  burdens  for  the  benefit  of  others,  but 
should  give  him  every  facility  to  run  his  race  of  existence, 
with  dignity  to  himself,  and  thus  truly  serve  the  ends  of 
society  and  his  own  creation,  in  passing  from  the  great 
eternity  of  the  past  into  the  illimitable  future. 

Here,  we  are  not  left  m  the  dark,  as  to  the  meaning  of  the 
words  of  the  New  Jersey  new  Constitution,  for  it  is  almost 
14 


314.  ALVAN   8TEWAET.  ' 

an  exact  copy  of  the  first  section  of  the  Massachusetts  Con- 
stitution of  1780.  The  first  section  of  the  Massachusetts 
Constitution  is  in  these  words : 

"  Article  1st.  All  men  are  born  free  and  equal,  and  have 
certain  natural,  essential,  and  inalienable  rights,  among  which 
may  be  reckoned  the  right  of  enjoying  and  defending  their 
lives  and  liberties  ;  that  of  acquiring,  possessing,  and  protect- 
ing property ;  in  fine,  that  of  seeking  and  obtaining  their 
safety  and  happiness." 

Here  Mr.  S.  asked  Mr.  Zabriskie,  counsel  for  the  claimant 
of  Mary  Tebout,  if  he  contended  there  was  any  difference 
between  the  two  sections  of  these  Constitutions?  Mr. 
Zabriskie  replied,  he  did  not. 

The  New  Jersey  Constitution  has  in  the  10th  Article 
these  words :  "  The  common  law  and  statute  laws  now  in  full 
force,  not  repugnant  to  this  Constitution,  shall  remain  in 
force  until  they  expire  by  their  own  limitation,  or  be  altered 
or  repealed  by  the  legislature." 

Further,  Mr.  S.  said  that  he  relied  on  a  portion  of  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  for  emancipation,  by  this 
honorable  court,  to  wit,  the  Magna  Charta  portion,  where  it 
asserts  "  that  no  person  shall  be  deprived  of  life,  liberty  or 
property,  without  due  process  of  law." 

The  case  of  "Winchendon  v.  Hadfield,  4th  Mass.  Rep.,  123, 
is  the  case  of  one  Edoin  Landon,  in  relation  to  the  question 
as  to  which  of  the  towns  should  support  him,  he  having  been 
a  slave  in  Massachusetts,  and  sold  eleven  times,  enlisted  twice 
in  the  Revolutionary  army,  the  second  time  for  three  years, 
his  master  receiving  his  bounty  and  his  wages — also,  4th 
Mass.,  539.  Chief  Justice  Parsons  decided  in  this  cause  that 
slavery  had  been  abolished  by  the  first  section  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts Constitution,  as  had  been  decided  in  former  unre- 
ported  cases.  This  is  legal  authority,  in  effect,  on  the  very 
words  of  the  New  Jersey  Constitution,  1st  article ;  Massa- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEE8ET.  315 

chusetts  has  shed  from  the  lamp  of  her  judiciary  as  pure, 
bright  and  steady  a  light  as  any  court  in  the  new  world,  and 
has  done  her  fair  share  in  elevating  the  science  of  the  law.  I 
repose  with  great  confidence  upon  this  authority ;  it  covers 
the  whole  controversy. 

The  case  of  the  slave  Med,  I8th  Pickering,  193,  known 
under  the  name  of  Commonwealth  vs.  Thomas  Aves,  pre- 
sented -within  the  last  half  dozen  years  this  same  great  ques- 
tion collaterally.  The  argument  was  elaborate,  and  the 
opinion  of  Chief  Justice  Shaw  luminous. 

Chief  Justice  Shaw  says,  Massachusetts  in  1641  abolished 
slavery,  except  of  captives  taken  in  lawful  war  or  guilty  of 
crime.  But  slavery  grew  up  in  Massachusetts,  and  in  1703 
an  act  was  passed  in  that  colony,  imposing  restrictions  on  the 
transmission  of  aged  and  infirm  slaves ;  and  by  an  act  of 
1705,  a  duty  was  levied  on  the  importation  of  slaves,  showing 
slavery  in  full  force  until  abolished  by  their  Constitution  of 
1780.  The  Chief  Justice,  in  this  case,  says  it  is  now  well 
established  law  that  slavery  was  abolished  by  the  Constitu- 
tion of  1780,  and  before  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States,  slavery  being  repugnant  to  the  principles 
of  justice,  of  nature,  and  the  declaration  of  rights,  which  are 
a  component  part  of  the  Constitution  of  Massachusetts. 
Slavery,  said  he,  crept  into  Massachusetts  by  force  of  custom 
existing  in  the  West  Indies  and  in  several  other  States, 
encouraged  by  the  mother  country  (miserable  Apology  better 
than  none,  even  in  Massachusetts). 

Chief  Justice  Shaw  says,  "  Slavery  is  a  relation  founded 
in  force  and  not  in  right ;  existing,  where  it  does,  by  force 
of  positive  law,  and  not  recognized  and  founded  in  natural 
rights."  Slavery,  he  says,  "  is  contrary  to  natural  rights,  to 
the  principles  of  justice  and  humanity."  He  then  says, 
"  Bond  slavery  cannot  exist  in  this  Commonwealth,  because 
it  is  contrary  to  natural  right,  repugnant  to  the  Constitution 


316  ALVAN   STEWART. 

and  law,  designed  to  secure  the  liberty  and  rights  of  all 
persons  who  come  within  the  limits  of  this  State,  as  entitled 
to  the  protection  of  law." 

But  what  case  can  I  have  stronger  than  the  opinion  of  Chief 
Justice  Marshall,  himself  a  slaveholder  ?  Borne  down  by 
slaveholding  construction  as  he  was,  still  his  innate  integrity 
triumphed  over  cultivated  wrong,  and  compelled  him  to 
define  slavery  as  contrary  to  the  law  of  nature,  for  the 
definition  of  slavery  by  the  civil  law,  showed  it  an  institution 
contrary  to  the  law  of  nature,  which  law  of  nature  Xew 
Jersey  has  adopted.  In  case  of  the  Antelope,  10th  Wheaton, 
120,  Chief  Justice  Marshall  says,  "That  slavery  is  contrary 
to  the  law  of  nature  will  scarcely  be  denied ;  that  every  man 
has  a  natural  right  to  the  fruits  of  his  own  labor  is  generally 
admitted,  and  that  no  other  person  can  rightfully  deprive  him 
of  those  fruits,  and  appropriate  them  against  his  will,  seems 
the  necessary  result  of  that  admission."  Chief  Justice  Mar- 
shall quotes  the  definition  of  slavery  in  the  Latin  from  the 
civil  law,  which,  with  his  own  opinion,  would  seem  to  put  the 
question  in  this  case  for  ever  to  rest.  It  is  this,  "  Servitus 
est  constitutio  juris  gentium  qua  quis  Domino  alieno  COZSTBA 
NAxrRAM  subjicitur."  Slavery  is  an  institution  by  the  laws 
of  nations,  by  which  one  is  subjected  to  another  man,  as 
master,  contrary  to  nature.  Slavery  strikes  down  and  repeals, 
if  it  could,  the  law  of  nature  referred  to  in  the  1st  article 
of  your  Constitution ;  what  can  be  stronger  and  more  com- 
plete ? 

Here  Mr.  Stewart  gave  way  for  an  adjournment  until  3  P.M.,* 
for  dining. 

The  court  being  present  at  3  o'clock,  P.M.,  Mr.  Stewart 
resumed  by  saying :  Has  any  lawyer  the  courage  to  say  that 
the  legislature  of  New  Jersey  could  create  the  institution  of 
slavery  to-day  in  defiance  of  the  new  Constitution  ?  Perhaps 
most,  if  not  all,  would  say  No.  Why  could  not  the  legisla- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  317 

ture  enact  such  a  law  so  as  to  create  the  relation  of  slave  and 
master?  It  would  be  correctly  answered,  and  by  all,  that  it 
would  be  repugnant  to  the  new  Constitution  and  its  first 
section.  Do  not  we  discover  that  a  law  sustaining  slavery  is 
equally  repugnant  to  the  new  Constitution,  whether  passed 
ten  years  before  it,  or  ten  years  after  it  ?  and  that  the  repug- 
nance is  not  a  question  of  past  or  present  time  ?  If  it  is 
repugnant,  it  is  equally  so  in  the  one  case  as  the  other — "  it 
is  so  odious  nothing  but  positive  law  can  sustain  it,"  says  Lord 
Mansfield. 

Mr.  S.  said  that  he  had  confessed  himself  to  have  much 
respect  for  a  being  so  highly  honored  as  man  by  his  Maker,  a 
being  created  in  the  image  of  God,  who  showed  at  all  times 
the  grandeur  of  his  descent,  and  the  illustriousness  of  his 
lineage  by  that  great  unimpeachable  record  written  upon  his 
countenance  sublime,  by  the  finger  of  God,  which  no  poverty, 
sorrow,  or  crime,  could  erase :  its  marks  of  origin  were  open 
to  all,  read  of  all,  and  should  be  comprehended  by  all.  In 
the  first  place  we  must  look  at  the  immense  natural  wealth, 
or  God-given  possessions,  which  belong  to  the  meanest  man, 
who  prints  the  green  earth  with  his  foot,  or  drinks  from  its 
waters,  and  renews  life  every  moment  from  the  unbought 
atmosphere — is  fanned  by  the  wings  of  the  wind,  cheered 
with  the  eye-possession  of  the  universe ;  yes,  his  eveiy-day 
existence  could  not  be  sustained,  at  a  less  expense  than  the 
fitting  up  of  two  worlds,  for  his  accommodation,  the  earth 
and  sun  ;  the  bread  he  eats,  the  wool,  the  flax,  and  cotton  he 
wears,  is  warmed  into  life  by  rays  of  light  from  the  sun,  sent 
over  ninety  millions  of  miles  in  profusion,  without  stint,  each 
ray  having  its  definite  office  and  distinct  commission  to  aid  to 
life,  strength  and  joy,  a  single  human  being.  If  there  were 
but  one  man  on  this  globe,  these  vast  structures  of  two 
worlds  must  be  reared  in  all  their  architectural  grandeur  and 
fitness.  This  globe  must  revolve  around  on  its  own  axis 


318  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

every  twenty-four  hours,  and  shoot  along  upon  the  vast  plain 
of  the  ecliptic,  at  the  inconceivable  rate  of  sixty-eight  thou- 
sand miles  per  hour.  Man  perishes,  if  the  globe  were  to 
revolve  around  the  sun  at  the  rate  of  thirty -four  thousand 
miles  per  hour ;  man  could  not  live  in  these  regions  with  a 
year  of  seven  hundred  and  thirty  days,  with  the  unbroken 
severities  of  a  double  winter,  or  the  scorching  heat  of  a  pro- 
tracted summer. 

The  outlay  of  Almighty  power,  which  sends  this  noble 
earth  careering  round  the  sun  with  such  prodigious  force, 
and  brings  it  back  to  the  same  point,  in  absolute  space  with 
infinite  precision,  with  the  punctuality  of  God,  is  a  portion  of 
each  man's  inheritance ;  and  all  the  powers  ever  displayed 
by  man,  exerted  by  beasts,  felt  from  winds,  or  overwhelmed 
by  tornadoes,  or  moved  in  tempests,  or  lifted  or  sunk  by 
earthquakes,  swept  by  tides,  or  driven  by  inundations,  put 
forth  since  the  morning  of  creation,  would  not  furnish  a 
sufficient  force,  to  propel  our  globe  on  its  everlasting  journey, 
a  single  day.  Yet  for  man  these  high  demonstrations  are 
made,  to  fit  him  up  an  abode  with  the  finish  of  Omnipotence, 
commensurate  with  his  every  want ;  it  is  his  God-inherited 
estate  ;  and  were  the  poorest  man  on  earth  to  exchange  that 
estate,  for  the  power  of  Bonaparte,  when  all  Europe  shook 
beneath  his  tread,  and  trembled  at  his  power,  this  poor 
man  would  be  undone,  by  the  exchange ;  the  property  is  too 
great  for  any  one  to  buy  of  another ;  this  is  the  benevolence 
of  Heaven  to  its  honored  creature,  man.  When  each  man's 
God-inherited  estate  is  reckoned  and  computed,  though  pos- 
sessing nothing  else,  and  compared  with  that  of  any  other 
man's  God-inherited  estate,  they  are  equal ;  and  if  one  pos- 
sess a  million  of  pounds,  and  the  other  no  money,  still  when 
their  whole  possessions  are  considered,  one  has  one  hundred, 
and  the  other  but  one  hundred  and  one.  This  proposition  or 
statement  will  forever  vindicate  the  goodness  of  Heaven,  and 


SLAVERY    IN   NEW    JERSEY.  319 

show  the  absolute  equality  of  all  men,  if  considered  possession- 
wise. 

Therefore  it  seems  to  me,  that  the  Declaration  of  Indepen- 
dence in  asserting  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,  is 
true  as  a  proposition,  and  is  not  a  rhetorical  flourish,  but  a 
sublime  estimate,  no  less  grand  than  true,  when  we  refer  to 
the  vast  possessions  of  each  human  being;  and  that  any 
accidental  variance  by  the  acquisitions  of  one,  of  more  wealth 
than  another,  does  not  disturb  the  great  result  anymore  than 
the  dust  which  may  fall  upon  one  of  the  scales  shall  change 
their  general  equipoise. 

All  men  are  created  equal,  and  shall  a  being  of  such 
amazing  dignity  and  immense  possessions,  of  such  grand 
lineage,  be  made  a  slave  ?  God  forbid.  Equality,  life, 
liberty  of  locomotion,  the  rights  of  acquiring  happiness  in 
every  way  we  see  fit,  not  violating  the  rights  of  our  brother 
man,  or  the  edicts  of  heaven,  with  the  God-inherited  estate, 
constitute  what  your  Constitution  and  that  of  Massachusetts 
and  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  describe  as  rights  in- 
alienable. Is  it  iiot  so  ?  What  kind  of  a  deed  must  that  be 
which  should  attempt  to  convey  my  right  and  title  in  the 
wind,  atmosphere,  earth,  and  my  share  in  the  power  that 
propels  this  ponderous  globe  around  the  sun  ? — my  title  to 
the  exhaustless  fires  and  light  of  that  great  luminary,  and  of 
those  rays  which  might  fall  on  me  or  on  the  earth  and  pro- 
duce my  raiment  and  food  ?  Is  there  not  deep  and  philoso- 
phical truth  in  asserting  the  inalienability  of  rights  like 
these,  so  essential  to  man's  existence,  and  his  everlasting 
accountability  to  the  Father  of  all,  for  his  abounding  munifi- 
cence, with  which  man  can  invest  no  other  being,  or  divest 
himself.  Can  it  not  truly  be  said  that  a  being  who  is  born 
to  such  great  possessions,  is  born  free  and  independent  ? 
The  greatest  blot  on  American  character  is,  to  have  been 
deluded  by  slaveholders  into  a  belief  that  those  great  words 


320  ALVAN.   STEWAKT. 

expressed  by  the  men,  who  wrote  and  adopted  the  Declara- 
tion of  our  Independence,  were  mere  abstractions  and  the 
flourish  of  oratory,  where  they  declared  the  great  self-evident 
truth  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,  and  are 
possessed  of  certain  inalienable  rights,  among  which  are  life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,"  and  that  the  same 
were  meaningless.  These  truths  are  self-evident,  and  why  ? 
They  are  evident  in  every  breath  of  air  we  respire  through 
our  lungs,  every  step  we  take,  in  every  object  we  behold, 
printed  oft  every  tree,  written  on  every  cloud,  bursting  forth 
in  every  falling  drop  of  rain,  reflected  in  every  ray  of  light, 
by  which  the  universe  is  warmed,  and  in  glory  lit  up,  and  by 
the  succession  of  day  and  night,  summer  and  winter,  seed- 
time and  harvest ;  in  fact,  its  self-evidence  is  stereotyped  in 
eternal  beauty  upon  the  earth,  the  sea,  the  mountain,  the 
valley,  upon  the  moon,  the  sun,  and  stars  of  heaven.  This 
constitutes  the  great  record  of  ever-daring  self-evidence,  that 
all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,  and  are  possessed  of 
certain  inalienable  rights,  etc. 

This  rises  to  a  moral,  if  not  a  mathematical  demonstration  ; 
and  that  a  great  nation  should,  so  far  as  individuals,  forget 
the  dignity  of  their  origin,  the  vastness  of  their  inalienable 
possessions,  and  should  hunt  for  arguments  to  force  their 
debasement  and  search  for  reasons  to  undervalue  such  a 
being  as  man,  especially  in  a  great  selfocracy,  where  each 
man  is  a  sovereign,  is,  among  all  strange  things,  one  which 
would  exceed  belief  were  we  not  met  by  the  strange  pheno- 
menon at  every  turn  of  human  affairs.  Had  we  incorporated 
the  divine  sentiments  of "  our  great  Declaration  into  our 
minds,  as  an  everlasting  first-principle,  and  lived  under  the 
sway  of  its  glorious  dominion,  no  slavery  would  then  have 
disgraced  our  magnificent  country  ;  no  half  cultivated,  forlorn 
and  deserted  sections  of  slave  States,  would  have  told  the 
world  their  melancholy  tale.  No  coffled  gang  of  slaves  would 


SLAVERY   IN    NEW   JERSEY.  321 

have  dishonored  our  nation,  driven  from  State  to  State,  for 
sale.  No,  our  prosperity,  riches,  glory  and  moral  elevation, 
would  have  presented  so  imposing  an  example  of  man's  capa- 
bilities for  his  own  advancement,  that  king-craft  aristocracies 
and  all  of  that  coarse  mode  of  working,  taxing  and  governing 
men,  as  family-jobs,  would,  long  ere  this,  have  been  thrown 
into  the  rear  of  the  camp  of  human  progress,  and  new  forms 
of  self-government  would  have  succeeded,  in  which  the 
governed  should  have  been  the  governors,  and  the  interest 
of  the  governed  would  have  prevailed,  in  the  true  advance- 
ment of  the  human  race. 

"We  have  terrible  penalties  to  pay,  for  abandoning  princi- 
ples so  glorious,  so  wise,  of  which  we  have  had  a  full  view, 
and  for  saying,  most  shamefully,  that  the  Declaration  of 
Independence  is  a  formula  and  not  serious,  the  poetry  of 
excited  minds.  By  thus  forsaking  these  great  truths,  certain 
and  as  practical  as  the  decalogue,  we  fell  back  into  the  arms 
of  a  low,  base  expediency,  and  re-lived  forms  of  crimes  and 
follies  of  former  ages,  holding  these  sublime  truths  as  abstrac- 
tions, fitted  only  for  the  meridian  of  heaven,  with  angels  for 
their  operatives,  to  carry  them  out,  while  we  fed  ourselves 
upon  the  husks  of  former  absurdities,  rejecting  truth,  holding 
it  too  beautiful  for  practical  use. 

Will  not  this  court  set  the  nation  the  shining  example  of 
doing  right,  on  this  question,  by  acting  up  to  the  full  measure 
of  their  judicial  and  moral  power  ? 

A  nation  may  lose  its  liberty  in  a  day,  and  not  miss  it  in 
a  hundred  years  ;  this  nation  lost  its  true  liberty,  the  clear 
light,  the  first  moment  the  great  words  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence  ceased  to  be  honored  and  respected  as  house- 
hold, every-day  truth,  the  fundamental  rules  of  action,  as  the 
political  and  moral  mathematics  of  the  nation. 

Although  we  make  several  hundred  volumes  of  fourth  of 
July  orations,  poetical  self-glorifications  and  boasting  eulo- 
14*  - 


322  AI.VAN    STEWART. 

giums  for  the  home-market,  yearly,  in  which  the  most  beauti- 
ful descriptions  are  given  of  the  dress  and  form  of  liberty,  as 
a  wonderful  unknown  goddess,  and  amuse  ourselves  in 
describing  her  altar,  the  costliness  of  her  sacrifices,  and  the 
riches  of  her  perfume,  and  the  curling  smoke  of  her  incense ; 
yet  if  in  the  everyday  intercourse  of  man  with  man,  of  courts 
of  justice  with  causes,  in  expounding  the  doctrines  of  the  great 
declaration  and  of  legislation,  in  framing  new  rules  of  action, 
we  should  with  one  consent,  have  asserted  that  in  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  and  other  national  and  State 
Constitutions  containing  the  same  thoughts,  that  liberty  was 
sincere,  in  declaring  the  freedom  and  equality  of  all  men,  and 
the  inalienability  of  the  rights,  of  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness,  we  should  not  have  lost  liberty  ;  for  not  so  doing, 
we  have  lost  liberty,  though  we  do  not  miss  it ;  we  have  only 
liberty's  casket,  but  the  jewel  is  gone ;  we  are  playing  and 
satisfying  ourselves  with  forms  when  the  substance  has 
departed.  We  make  the  loud  acclaim,  we  fire  the  cannon  of 
salutation,  crackers  burst  under  our  feet,  our  toasts  may  be 
drank  in  three  times  three,  in  the  wildest  uproar  of  animal 
excitement ;  still  these  demonstrations  are  worse  than  sense- 
less, because  they  make  us  think  we  are  true  believers  in 
h'berty  and  the  divine  dignity  of  man,  while  we  are  only 
high-heeled  hypocrites  and  fanatics,  spinning  in  concentric 
circles,  like  brain-turned  dervishes  around  an  abstraction  of 
liberty,  being  neither  flesh  nor  spirit,  being  the  great  indefi- 
nable, our  adoration  increasing  with  our  ignorance,  until  the 
beatitude  of  our  worship  is  made  complete  in  the  perfect 
idealess.  Still,  for  a  pretence,  we  make  long  speeches  about 
Republicanism  and  Democracy,  while  we  have  nailed  and 
crucified,  in  and  through  our  colored  brother,  Liberty  on  the 
cross.  We  have  so  long  been  absent  from  true  liberty,  that 
we  should  require  a  formal  introduction  before  we  should 
dare  address  her,  for  she  is  not  that  tawdry  dressed  cyprian 


SLAVEKY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  323 

bearing  her  name,  who  had  sold  her  charms  to  demagogues, 
pimps,  panders,  pirates,  buccaneers  and  slaveholders,  whip  in 
hand,  who  have  declared  that  slavery  is  the  chief  corner- 
stone of  our  republican  institutions  :  while  the  clergy  of  the 
south  have  most  impiously  averred  slavery  to  be  a  Bible, 
God-honored,  Christian  institution,  to  be  kept.  Shameful 
impiety  and  desecration  of  the  fountain  of  Eternal  truth. 

The  court  will  pardon  me  while  we  look  for  a  moment  at 
the  sublime  teaching  of  that  wonderful  and  holy  book,  the 
Bible,  so  often  lugged  in  to  uphold  piracy  at  the  expense  of 
the  Eternal's  justice  and  man's  happiness.  The  Almighty 
has  done  a  thousand  fold  more,  to  express  his  infinite  abhor- 
rence of  slavery,  than  of  all  other  crimes  and  offences  against 
his  law.  He  has  suspended  the  laws  of  nature,  and  in  one 
instance  of  time,  smote  two  and  a  half  millions  of  people  with 
death,  and  caused  the  sea  itself  to  retreat  before  the  fugitive 
slave,  and  made,  as  predicated  on  these  amazing  exercises  of 
power,  a  direct  revelation  ofJiimself,  and  immediately  caused 
our  revealed  religion  to  be  produced,  to  express  his  everlast- 
ing detestation  of  a  crime  which  would  unthrone  Him,  and 
crush  his  creature  man,  and  place  him  beside  the  beast  of  the 
field.  Our  maker  destroyed  the  first  edition  of  mankind.  In 
the  second  emission  and  publication  of  our  race,  Egypt  became 
the  schoolmaster  nation  of  the  human  race,  and  the  great 
instructor  of  mankind.  The  nations  of  the  earth,  on  camels 
and  dromedaries,  came,  in  the  infancy  of  antiquity,  to  Egypt, 
to  exchange  their  rude  materials  and  ignorance  for  the 
Egyptian  works  of  art  and  knowledge.  In  fact,  no  opinion 
was  considered  worthy  of  general  acceptance,  by  the  surround- 
ing barbarians,  unless  it  had  an  Egyptian  indorsement,  and 
their  wise  men's  stamp  and  mai'k  upon  it. 

It  appeared  that  the  Israelites,  in  near  four  hundred  years, 
had  increased  to  two  and  a  half  millions  of  people,  as  would 
seem  from  the  number  of  men  spoken  of  in  their  Exodus. 


324:  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

The  Pharaohs  had  a  slave  market  for  centuries.  The  poor 
Jews  had  become  slaves  of  the  most  distressing  type.  They 
had  their  overseers,  their  distinct  tasks  ;  they  were  scourged, 
and  had  every  mark  of  human  debasement  and  slavery  in- 
flicted. The  day  of  their  deliverance  was  in  an  age,  in  which 
the  passion  for  public  structures,  imposing  in  their  magnitude, 
wonderful  in  their  display  of  high-wrought  efforts  of  genius, 
constituted  the  chief  employment  of  their  kings,  and  great 
men,  for  centuries.  The  poor  Hebrews  had  often  laid  their 
petitions  before  Pharaoh  through  Moses  and  Aaron,  asking  to 
be  permitted  to  go  into  the  wilderness,  and  worship  their 
God.  But  Pharaoh,  as  a  slaveholder,  stood  between  this 
people  and  their  conscience,  and  refused  to  let  them  go. 
Slavery  strikes  down  the  rights  of  conscience  always,  for  there 
is  not  a  slave  in  the  United  States,  who  is  informed  in  any 
reasonable  degree  in  the  Christian  religion,  who  does  not 
remain  in  slavery,  contrary  to  the  plainest  teachings  of  his 
own  conscience.  The  Almighty  having  warned  the  Egyptian 
government  of  the  great  crime  of  holding  men  in  bondage, 
was  determined,  in  the  early  ages  of  mankind,  to  settle  the 
question  of  his  infinite  abhorrence  of  slavery,  in  a  manner  so 
elementary  and  signal,  that  the  stamp  of  His  finger-marks 
should  remain  unerasable  through  all  coming  ages.  For 
slavery  overthrows  the  will  of  the  victim,  and  the  claim  of 
the  Almighty  to  the  adoration  of  his  creatures  ;  and  no  power 
can  get  in  between  God  and  man,  and  interfere  on  this  sub- 
ject, unless  it  is  slavery.  Slavery  breaks  down  the  will, 
volition,  and  choice  of  its  victim ;  the  slaveholder  steps  in 
between  the  slave  and  his  Maker,  and  says,  oh,  slave,  talk 
not  of  conscience,  your  religion,  or  your  God ;  do  my  will, 
or  die ;  my  will  is  your  law,  and  not  your  God's;  my  will 
you  must  obey,  or  die.  Slavery  always  disputes  our  Maker's 
supremacy ;  warning  after  warning,  miracle  after  miracle,  had 
been  lost  upon  the  obduracy  of  Egypt's  king. 


SLAVEKY    IN   NEW   JEKSEY.  325 

One  morning,  as  the  population  of  that  kingdom  of  fifteen 
millions  of  people  arose  and  looked  at  their  beloved  Nile,  lo ! 
and  behold,  it  was  one  vast  river  of  blood,  from  the  cataracts 
where  its  tumbling  torrents  of  blood  fell  in  mighty  roar,  and 
pursued  their  sweeping  course  for  600  miles  to  its  seven 
mouths,  where  the  Mediterranean,  receiving  its  tribute  from 
this  ancient  servant,  blushed  for  twenty  leagues  around,  at 
Pharaoh's  impudence.  The  stranger  from  afar,  the  traders, 
seekers  of  knowledge,  and  the  citizens,  stood  that  livelong 
day,  and  wondered  at  the  bloody  Nile ;  and  as  reasons  were 
asked  and  given,  I  think  I  hear  them  say,  the  reason  why  the 
Nile  runs  blood  is  that  Pharaoh  holds  the  Hebrews  as  slaves, 
and  the  Hebrews'  God  demands  their  release,  and  shows  his 
anger  and  his  power^at  Pharaoh's  refusal.  The  stranger 
would  carry  this  news  to  the  utmost  bounds  of  living  man, 
saying,  one  entire  day  I  saw  the  Nile  run  blood,  to  express 
the  abhorrence  of  the  Hebrews'  God  against  the  crime  of 
slavery. 

Again,  the  heavens  were  darkened  at  noon  by  the  gyrations 
of  armies  of  locusts,  which  shut  out  the  sun,  and  they  con- 
sumed the  vegetation  of  this  fertile  land  ;  men  cried  for  mercy, 
and  in  a  few  hours  this  army  of  destructive  locusts  was  carried 
on  the  wings  of  a  strong  west  wind  into  the  depths  of  the 
Red  Sea,  not  one  left.  The  Egyptian  and  the  stranger  knew 
that  the  Hebrews'  God  had  done  this,  to  cause  these  poor 
slaves  to  be  delivered  from  the  mighty  monarch's  cruel 
power. 

On  a  certain  other  day  the  obstinate  Pharaoh  refused 
after  many  promises  to  let  the  poor  Hebrew  slaves  go  free. 
It  is  noon  ;  the  burning  power  of  a  June  sun  strikes  the  land; 
anon,  all  eyes  in  Egypt  are  turned  to  a  black  cloud  rising  out 
of  the  west,  over  the  Lybian  desert.  This  was  the  first 
thunder-storm  in  Egypt,  and  the  last,  for  it  neither  rains  nor 
hails  in  Egypt,  owing  to  the  great  Lybian  desert  of  sand  on 


326  ALVAN   6TEWART. 

the  west,  and  the  Arabian  desert  on  the  east,  as  philosophers 
suppose.  It  skirts  the  western  heavens,  and  the  terrific 
clouds  raise  themselves  higher  and  higher ;  men  turn  pale  ; 
anon  the  low  and  solemn  tones  of  thunder  are  heard ;  men 
tremble  and  say  it  is  the  voice  of  the  slaves'  God — in  a  mo- 
ment the  flashes  of  forked  lightning  play  with  infinite  quick- 
ness, men  fall  on  their  knees  and  declare  it  is  the  flashing  of 
the  angry  eyes  of  the  Hebrews'  God  at  the  Egyptians'  cru- 
elties. The  clouds  rise  to  the  high  altitude  of  noon  ;  the 
lightning,  the  winds,  and  roaring  thunder  send  consternation 
into  the  hearts  of  affrighted  men.  It  appears  like  night, 
nature  in  agony,  men  fear  to  speak,  and  believe  they  are  on 
the  eve  of  doom  ;  men  and  beasts  hide  themselves  in  extreme 
terror ;  the  thunder  makes  the  earth,  tremble  from  pole  to 
pole;  the  pyramids  rock  from  their  deep  foundations,  the 
rains  descend,  the  hail  beats  the  earth,  fire  and  ice  leap  from 
the  clouds,  while  the  lightning  strikes  down  the  trees,  plays 
round  the  pyramid  tops,  smites  the  sphinx,  and  runs  along 
upon  the  ground,  men  in  agony,  praying  for  deliverance ; 
Pharaoh  and  his  court  lie  prostrate  in  the  palace,  the  earth 
seems  shaken  out  of  its  place,  and  all  nature  in  convulsions. 
The  king  implores  mercy,  and  the  Father  of  ah1  hears,  pities, 
and  delivers  the  faithless  king  and  people,  and  ere  the  sun 
went  down,  that  storm  and  desolation  had  forever  gone  by, 
and  the  last  cloud  sunk  below  the  horizon  in  the  Red  Sea, 
while  the  beautiful  sun  rolls  down  the  western  heavens,  smil- 
ing in  mercy  from  and  beyond  the  dark  solitudes  of  the  in- 
terminable Lybian  sands.  This  storm,  all  men  knew,  was  an 
evidence  of  God's  displeasure  at  slavery.  But  Pharaoh 
would  not  let  the  people  go. 

It  is  in  Egypt  and  is  midnight  when  the  young  wife,  but 
two  years  married,  awoke  and  placed  her  hand  on  the 
shoulder  of  her  youthful  husband ;  he  was  as  cold  as  marble, 
he  would  not  awake  at  her  mournful  cry — he  was  dead,  he 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  327 

was  the  first  born  of  his  parents.  She  arose  in  wild  despair, 
she  lit  a  flambeau,  and  looked  at  her  little  babe  on  the  mat- 
tress ;  the  fixed  smile  was  there,  rigid  in  death,  never  to  be 
relaxed  ;  he  was  the  first  born  of  his  parents  ;  she  flies  to 
her  father's  and  mother's  bed  in  the  next  room,  she  awakes 
her  father,  but  none  but  the  archangel  can  arouse  her 
mother  from  death's  sleep,  most  profound  ;  she  was  the  first 
born  of  her  parents.  She  sends  her  man-servant  to  her 
neighbor  for  help  in  this  awful  hour  ;  the  servant  enters  the 
neighbor's,  a  light  is  there,  wailing  and  horror  meet  him. 
The  aged  father  of  the  second  house  was  the  first  born  of  his 
parents,  and  is  dead,  and  the  infant  first  born  is  also  dead. 
No  contortion,  no  groan  was  ever  heard  of  all  who  fell  in  a 
single  instant,  on  that  dreadful  night ;  they  lay  with  all  the 
peace  of  eternal  sleep  upon  them.  The  servant  finds  another 
servant  in  this  second  house  of  death,  they  go  out,  they  hear 
the  survivors'  wail,  and  see  the  baleful  torch  lit  up  in  every 
house  around  ;  they  ascend  a  tower  on  the  banks  of  the  Nile, 
high  above  and  all  around,  as  in  a  moment,  for  forty  miles,  as 
far  as  eye  can  measure  light  upon  the  earth's  dark  face,  the 
beams  of  the  death  torch  of  that  direful  hour  from  all  direc- 
tions strike  their  wretched  eyes.  The  lamentations  were 
loud  and  long  ;  and  when  the  morning  sun  arose,  the  angel 
of  death  for  long  hours  had  been  gone  from  the  abodes  of 
man  and  beast,  and  there  was  not  one  house  in  all  the  land 
of  Egypt  in  which  there  was  not  one  dead,  or  about  two  and 
half  millions — one-sixth  of  the  people,  or  a  life  of  one  of 
Egypt's  slaveholders  had  been  taken,  for  each  Hebrew  slave 
detained.  No  mistaking  the  power  and  will  of  the  God  of 
the  bondmen  longer,  and  the  affrighted  Pharaoh  and  his 
court" cry  to  these  slaves,  "  up  and  begone,  or  we  are  all  dead 
men."  The  funeral,  the  most  terrible  in  time,  then  followed. 
Nothing  like  these  deaths  or  funerals  in  the  history  of  our 
race. 


328  ALVAN   STEWABT. 

The  fugitive  slaves  had  inarched  to  the  northeast  and 
reached  the  Red  Sea,  and  were  in  great  fear,  reposing  on  its 
banks  between  two  mountains,  the  one  on  their  right,  and  the 
other  on  their  left.  Solemn  hours !  As  they  rested  we  may 
feign  that  young  Hebrews  climb  to  the  mountain  tops,  and 
saw  the  rising  clouds  of  dust  on  the  southwestern  edge 
of  the  heavens.  That  army  is  led  on  by  Pharaoh's  gene- 
rals, of  chariots  and  cavalry,  the  notes  of  trumpets  fell 
upon  their  ears,  and  the  young  men  cry  to  their  friends  be- 
low, "  They  come !  they  come !  we  hear  their  trumpets  on 
the  plain!"  Then  the  desponding  fugitives  cried,  "Were 
there  no  graves  in  Egypt  ?"  The  night  came,  portentous  ;  a 
mighty  cloud  rested  between  the  slaveholders  and  the 
trembling  fugitives.  On  the  side  next  to  the  poor  slaves,  the 
cloud  beamed  as  from  a  pillar  of  fire,  all  light,  the  smile  of 
heaven.  On  the  other  side  of  the  cloud  the  pursuing  slave- 
holders saw  it  all  dark,  lugubrious,  presaging  to  them  the 
horrors  of  their  last  day.  This  was  another  finger-mark  of 
Divine  power.  The  morning  lowered,  and,  in  clouds,  to 
these  sad  and  impious  slaveholders  heavily  brought  on  that 
day  whose  end  they  would  never  see.  The  trembling  fugi- 
tives stood  looking  nine  miles  across  the  intervening  Red 
Sea,  whose  waves  broke  in  melancholy  .murmurs  at  their 
feet.  Despair  was  on  every  face.  When  Moses  spoke, 
"  stand  still  and  see  the  salvation  of  the  Lord,"  another 
finger-mark  of  Omnipotence  was  made,  and  Moses  stretched 
out  his  rod  over  the  Red  Sea,  and  anon  a  long  line  of  sub- 
sidence of  the  waters  appears.  Every  fugitive  eye  saw  it. 
Then  the  reflowing  of  waters  from  that  central  line,  the 
piling  of  waters  follow ;  the  waters  ascend  and  pile,  ascend 
and  pile,  until  the  naked  bottom  across  appears  with  per- 
pendicular water  walls  of  great  height,  by  Omnipotence  held 
up,  and  probably  one  mile  wide  is  left  like  a  clean  beach. 
The  fugitives  pasg  down  on  this  untravelled  road,  and  finally 


SLAVERY   IN   JTOW   JERSEY.  329 

division  after  division  rose  upon  the  further  side.  At  length 
the  weak  passed  up,  the  cripple  climb  the  bank,  and  lo  !  there 
see  those  little  orphans  pull  themselves  up  by  twigs,  and  that 
poor  old  man  on  his  crutches,  they  help  pull  him  up — they 
are  all  up  and  over.  Now  rises  the  wildest,  grandest,  and 
most  sublime  music  which  ever  burst  from  human  lips — the 
fugitives'  song !  The  headlong  vindictive  slaveholders,  burn- 
ing with  rage,  thirsting  for  revenge,  follow  on  the  fugitives' 
track  into  the  sea ;  and  as  they  were  at  the  central  depths  of 
the  Red  Sea,  gravitation  was  permitted  to  re-assert  her 
ancient  law,  when  down  came  these  mighty  mountains  of 
waters  to  their  forsaken  bed.  Pharaoh  and  his  haughty 
hosts  expired  in  the  centre  of  a  miracle.  For  forty  years 
the  Almighty  fed  these  poor  fugitive  slaves  directly  from  His 
own  table. 

The  God  of  Heaven,  as  in  mercy  to  man,  that  he  might 
never  again  commit  the  atrocious  crime  involved  in  slavery, 
caused  Mount  Sinai  to  quake  from  its  deep  foundations,  and 
amidst  the  thunders  and  the  lightnings,  the  Almighty,  with 
his  own  finger,  wrote  the  tables  of  the  law,  his  ten  eternal 
orders,  which  are  most  eminent  Anti-Slavery  in  character, 
that  the  crime  which  had  shaken  Egypt  to  its  foundations, 
might  never  occur  again  for  want  of  a  Divine  prohibition. 
This  was  the  decalogue,  "  Love  the  Lord  thy  God  with  ah1  thy 
heart,  mind,  and  strength,  and  thy  neighbor  as  thyself."  This 
command  obeyed,  destroys  all  the  slavery  in  the  world.  What 
slaveholder  can  kindly  love  his  slave  unless  he  manumits  him  ? 

The  preface  to  these  commands,  in  the  sixth  verse  of  the 
fifth  chapter  of  Deuteronomy,  "  I  am  the  Lord  thy  God, 
which  brought  thee  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt,  and  from  the 
house  of  bondage." 

"  Honor  thy  father  and  mother."  N"o,  says  the  slave- 
holder, I  will  sell  your  father  and  mother,  you  must  obey 
your  master. 


330  ALVAN   STEWART. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  kill."  I  will  kill,  says  the  slaveholder,  if 
it  is  necessary,  by  flogging  to  obtain  submission ;  or  if  the 
slave  will  run  from  me  when  I  tell  him  to  stop,  I  will  shoot 
and  kill  him,  and  Southern  law  says  amen. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery."  I  will  commit  adultery, 
and  break  the  marriage  covenant  between  my  slaves,  and 
compel  them  to  marry  over  when  my  interest  will  be  pro- 
moted, or  separate  man  and  wife  by  sale  or  purchase,  and 
make  them  marry  again. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  steal."  I  will  steal,  and  appropriate,  says 
the  slaveholder,  all  that  man  hath,  all  he  can  earn,  and  the 
man  himself,  when  my  interest  can  be  promoted  thereby. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  covet."  I  will  covet  that  man's  or  that 
woman's  body,  and  I  will  possess  myself  of  them,  and  appro- 
priate them  to  my  own  use,  says  the  slaveholder. 

Look  at  the  condescension  of  the  Almighty.  He  made 
these  poor  fugitive  slaves  the  librarians  and  custodians  of 
the  revelation  of  his  will  to  mankind.  Slavery  treads  this 
revelation  under  foot,  and  quotes  the  Bible  to  prove 
slavery,  when  there  is  the  most  incontestable  evidence  that 
there  never  would  have  been  a  revelation  in  the  decalogue, 
but  as  the  finishing  stroke  of  those  awful  wonders  and  mira- 
cles, on  the  faith  of  which  our  religion  rests,  all  originating, 
converging  and  terminating  in  that  great  fundamental  pro- 
position, that  God  infinitely  abhors  slavery,  because  it  sup- 
plants his  direct  authority  over  the  will  of  His  child,  and 
throws  His  child,  with  an  immortal  mind,  made  in  his  own 
image,  into  the  category  of  brute-beasts,  thus  forever  over- 
throwing the  fundamental  relation  of  God  to  man,  of  man  to 
his  neighbor,  and  of  man  to  himself.  To  vindicate  the 
character,  power  and  justice  of  the  Supreme,  and  bring  man 
home  again  to  his  true  relations,  was  well  worthy  of  a  display 
of  such  awful  power,  introducing  Himself  as  God  to  the 
ancient  world. 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEESEY.  331 

Mr.  S.  said  there  was  another  proposition  which  he  wished 
to  glance  at  in  passing.  That  was  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States,  for  were  he  before  the  King's  Bench,  in  West- 
minister Hall,  he  would  there  insist,  and  he  believed  with 
entire  sucess,  that  there  was  not  a  slave  in  New  Jersey,  or 
in  any  slave  State,  who  had  been  deprived  of  his  liberty 
according  to  law.  I  mean  slaves  as  they  are  generally 
and  at  large,  and  not  those  who  have  been  convicted  of 
crimes  ;  and  therefore  there  is  not  a  slave,  if  you  admit  him 
a  person,  as  slaveholders  contend,  but  must  be  discharged  by 
a  judge  or  a  court,  on  being  brought  before  said  court  on  the 
ground  that  he  has  never  been  deprived  of  his  liberty  by  due 
process  of  law,  according  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.  That  record  must  be  produced,  originating  in  a 
decision  or  an  indictment  of  a  grand  jury,  and  the  finding  of 
a  petit  jury,  and  the  pronouncing  of  judgment  thereon, 
by  a  court  of  competent  jurisdiction.  This,  Sir  Edward 
Coke,  and  Judge  Story  on  Sir  Edward's  authority,  in 
his  Commentaries,  440,  says  is  the  meaning  of  due  pro- 
cess of  law  at  common  law,  as  used  in  Magna  Charta. 
But  I  am  willing  to  reduce  the  character  of  the  court, 
and  even  strike  out  the  petit  and  grand  jury  from  the 
instrumentality — and  then  I  say  that  "  due  process  of 
law"  means  a  court  or  some  judicial  personage,  one  or 
more  making  a  court,  who  have  adjudicated  the  man  to  be 
a  slave ;  and  if  that  record  cannot  be  found,  the  man  must 
go  free ;  or  the  individual  must  not  lose  his  liberty  without 
due  process  of  law.  That  record  cannot  be  found  in  this 
land.  Will  any  man  pretend  that  plantation  and  cart-whip 
discipline  is  due  process  of  law  ?  Will  any  pretend  that 
being  deprived  of  the  right  to  learn  to  read,  or  write,  as  in 
some  of  our  States,  under  the  penalty  of  twenty-five  lashes 
on  the  naked  back  of  the  teacher  and  the  taught,  is  due  pro- 
cess of  law  ?  Yes,  for  the  mother  to  teach  her  child  to  spell 


332  ALVAN   STEWART. 

the  name  of  the  Saviour,  for  the  second  attempt,  mother  and 
child  are  to  be  whipped  one  hundred  lashes  ;  for  the  third 
offence,  the  punishment  of  death.  Is  this  the  due  process  of 
law,  named  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  ? 
The  pursuing  of  fugitives  with  bloodhounds  cannot  be  the 
due  process  of  law  of  the  Constitution. 

The  separation  by  sale  of  husband  from  wife,  and  wife 
from  husband,  and  children  from  both,  to  suit  the  con- 
venience of  the  master,  cannot  be  due  process  of  law  ?  The 
being  born  of  slave  mother,  on  a  slaveholder's  plantation, 
cannot  be  due  process  of  law  ?  The  being  torn  away  from 
home,  kindred  and  friends,  and  sent  by  the  middle  passage 
to  a  slave  auction  in  South  Carolina,  and  sold  on  the  boards 
into  hopeless  bondage,  cannot  be  due  process  of  law? 

Is  not  slavery  a  punishment  or  an  infliction  on  men  beyond 
the  track  of  the  common  misfortunes  of  mankind,  of  sufficient 
magnitude  to  have  it  left  to  some  mortal  man,  in  the  shape 
of  a  justice  or  judge,  to  adjudicate  a  man  into  the  great  drag- 
net of  slavery  ?  For,  we  find  it  takes  the  strongest  judicial 
power  in  the  land  to  get  him  out.  Slaveholders  claim  him 
under  the  word  "  person  "  in  the  Constitution,  because  they 
say,  there  is  no  other  word  by  which  they  can  denote  slavery. 
The  word  person  I  have,  in  this  argument  in  relation  to  due 
process  of  law,  used  in  the  slaveholding  sense,  which  is,  after 
all,  downright  perversion. 

The  word  person,  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States, 
means  a  human  being  possessed  of  the  natural  rights  of  life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  The  word  person 
means  a  human  being  in  the  fullness  of  his  natural  rights, 
and  nothing  more.  The  Greeks,  Romans,  and  English, 
whether  using  the  word  in  law  or  in  common  parlance,  mean 
this,  and  nothing  more ;  and  you  can  legally  no  more  express 
the  idea  of  a  slave  by  it  than  you  can  that  of  a  king.  A  man 
who  is  a  slave,  according  to  slave  law,  has  lost  his  personage, 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  333 

if  I  may  so  speak,  and  has  passed  into  chattlehood,  or  thing- 
hood,  and  all  the  rights  of  person  are  annihilated,  or  in  a 
state  of  suspended  animation,  until  the  pure  air  of  liberty 
inflates  his  lungs  again.  The  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  is  an  Anti-Slavery  document,  in  its  general  spirit  and 
tendencies ;  and  under  other  auspices  and  circumstances 
would  have  been  called  a  great  act  of  universal  emancipation, 
and  have  set  eveiy  slave  free  in  the  land,  being  paramount 
law,  without  doing  the  thousandth  part  of  violence  in  con- 
struction which  has  been  done  by  a  slaveholding  interpreta- 
tion, by  which  it  has  been  made  into  a  slaveholding  document, 
to  create  the  horrid  institution  by  reenacting  the  slave-laws 
of  the  two  States  of  Virginia  and  Maryland,  thereby  cover- 
ing the  two  sections  of  the  District  of  Columbia,  in  creating 
and  regulating  by  territorial  laws,  slavery  in  eight  of  the. 
new  States ;  five  of  which,  Florida,  Louisiana,  Mississippi, 
Arkansas  and  Missouri,  were  not  a  portion  of  the  United 
States  or  its  territories  at  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States.  The  Congress  of  the  United  States 
under  slaveholding  dictation  created  slavery,  therefore,  in 
Kentucky,  Tennessee  and  Alabama,  a  portion  of  our  territory 
at  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution ;  and  in  the  other  five 
States  the  nation  purchased  the  territory  and  created  the 
institution  in  them  as  territories,  and  the  Congress  then 
brought  these  five  slave  States  into  the  sisterhood  of  the 
republic.  And  now  we  are  told  slavery  is  a  State  institution, 
and  is  beyond  the  reach  of  any  power  of  Congress,  for  its 
extermination  ;  that  is,  that  Congress  has  power  to  create 
and  fasten  this  infernal  institution  on  a  territory,  but  has  no 
power  to  abolish  it  anywhere,  after  it  has  enacted  it  once 
into  existence,  either  in  its  territorial  or  State  character ;  it 
has  no  power  to  lop,  restrain  or  eradicate  slavery  from  a 
State  or  territory,  but  is  bound  to  foster  and  nurture  it  with 
parental  care,  as  one  of  the  patriarchal,  domestic  and  peculiar 


334:  ALVAN    STEWART. 

institutions  of  the  South.  Permit  me  to  assert,  as  it  regards 
these  States,  that  Congress  had  no  more  power  to  create 
slavery  there  in  the  beginning  than  it  had  to  create  an  auto- 
crat in  either  of  those  States  or  territories,  in  whose  hand  and 
his  heirs  all  power,  legislative,  judicial  and  executive,  should 
be  centred  forever,  with  full  power  to  sell  or  dispose  of  the 
bodies  of  all  the  people  or  inhabitants  who  should  or  might 
come  within  the  bounds  of  his  territory  or  State.  For  the 
power  exercised  in  the  case  of  slavery  by  one  half  of  the 
inhabitants  over  the  other,  is  precisely  the  same  in  degree 
and  kind  as  that  described,  only  the  number  of  the  autocrats 
is  increased.  Each  autocrat  has  a  less  number  of  subjects, 
but  the  power  exercised  is  precisely  the  same  in  extent,  and 
in  relation  to  those  on  whom  it  operates,  is  the  same  precise 
autocratism,  as  though  there  was  but  one  despot.  Now  I 
deny  that  Congress  has  lawful  power  to  do  any  such  thing. 

Many  persons  run  to  the  Madison  papers  published  in  the 
last  few  years,  to  ascertain  the  meaning  cf  the  framers  of  the 
Constitution,  who  met  in  Philadelphia  in  1787,  as  a  mere 
committee  of  the  nation,  sent  out  to  report  to  the  people  the 
form  of  a  Constitution  for  their  adoption  in  the  summer  of 
1788.  I  deny  in  any  event,  the  right  to  resort  to  this  mode 
of  interpretation,  to  contradict  the  noble  and  glorious  text 
of  that  document ;  but  supposing  this  a  correct  mode  of 
getting  darkness  into  the  room  to  show  the  light,  still  it  is 
not  applied  at  the  right  point.  Thirteen  State  conventions 
were  held  in  the  year  1788,  by  the  authority  of  their  respec- 
tive legislatures,  to  adopt  or  reject  what  had  been  framed, 
by  a  committee-convention  of  the  nation,  as  a  body  of 
draughters  of  the  form  of  the  Constitution,  who  had  been 
sent  to  Philadelphia,  during  the  summer  of  1787,  to  do  that 
very  work  ;  not  to  adopt  that  Constitution,  but  to  report  the 
form  of  one,  to  the  people  of  the  States. 

In  the  summer  of  1788,  the  people,  in  their  thirteen  State 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  335 

Conventions,  by  the  constitutional  number  of  nine,  adopted 
this  Constitution  ^  and  if  this  rule  of  interpretation  now 
sought  to  be  adopted,  could  be  made  applicable  anywhere,  we 
should  have  to  go  to  the  adopters,  and  not  the  framers. 
What,  and  how  did  the  adopters,  the  people,  understand  this 
instrument  when  they  adopted  it  ?  Did  they  understand  it 
in  any  sense  different  from  what  it  imports  on  its  face  ? 
Where  are  the  secret  intentions,  private  understandings, 
those  implied  guaranties  and  curious  fanciful  compromises 
of  those  thirteen  Conventions  of  adopters  f  Have  they  ever 
come  to  light  except  in  some  long  speech  of  some  southern 
slaveholding  orator  ?  How  came  the  descendants  of  those 
slaveholders  of  1788  to  be  made  the  special  depositees  of  all 
those  secret  guaranties,  compromises,  and  implied  under- 
standings, in  behalf  of  slavery,  now  spoken  of  with  a  confi- 
dence as  startling  as  the  information  communicated  is  impor- 
tant, novel,  and  false.  This  was  not  so.  These  are  mere 
after-thoughts  of  despotism.  No  man  has  ever  shown  one 
word  from  the  adopters,  conflicting  with  the  text.  Shall  a 
committee  sent  out  by  the  nation,  affix  to  well  understood 
language  of  the  common  law,  and  of  every  day  use,  some 
secret  cabalistic  meaning  in  hostility  to  the  text ;  and  then 
get  the  people,  through  their  Conventions,  to  adopt  the 
Constitution  for  the  beautiful  principles  it  expressed  on  its 
face,  and  after  that  was  accomplished,  to  wait  till  the  framers 
and  adopters  are  dead,  and  then  to  come  out  and  say,  ah, 
the  people  have  adopted  this  Constitution,  for  what  it  pur- 
ported on  its  face,  but  we,  the  sons  and  grandsons  of  the 
southern  framers,  have  a  cabalistic  key  left  by  our  grand- 
fathers in  the  South,  by  which,  when  the  word  justice 
appears,  our  grandfathers  meant  slavery  or  w justice ;  when 
we  used  the  word  persons  we  meant  slaves  sometimes,  and 
sometimes  free  persons  /  when  we  said  "  no  person  shall  be 
deprived  of  life,  liberty  or  property  without  due  process  of 


336  AT. VAN   STEWART. 

law,"  we  there  understood  a  slave  to  be  a  chattel  or  a  piece 
of  property,  and  not  a  person;  we  had  a  sliding-scale  by 
which  we  used  the  word  person  for  slave  when  the  interest 
of  the  slaveholder  is  to  be  promoted,  but  when  the  language 
can  be  applied  to  him  as  a  person  in  another  part  of  the 
instrument,  and  thereby  set  him  free,  the  intendment  is  to 
be  against  liberty,  and  we  did  not  mean  that  he  should  have 
any  of  the  blessings  of  the  Constitution,  but  only  its  curses 
and  its  cruelty.  When  the  word  person  means  bitter,  it  is 
the  slave's  portion ;  when  the  word  person  means  siceet,  he 
has  no  lot  or  part  in  that  matter.  Although  the  word  person 
never  meant  slave  in  any  written  document  before  we  affixed 
it  among  ourselves,  or  our  grandfathers  did,  in  this  peculiar 
sense,  and  refused  to  use  the  word  slave.  This  was  the 
secret  opinion  of  the  drafters,  who  supposed  they  could  thus 
deceive  the  adopters  into  adoption.  When  we  enacted  that 
Article  by  which  we  said  "  the  United  States  shall  guarantee 
a  republican  form  of  governmeut  to  each  of  the  States,"  we 
knew  the  old  and  true  meaning  of  a  republican  form  of  govern- 
ment to  be  one  in  which  the  government  was  made  by  and 
for  the  benefit  of  the  governed,  and  that  each  person  in  a 
republican  form  of  government  was  born  free  and  equal,  and 
entitled  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  This, 
we  knew,  would  by  force  of  this  provision  in  the  Constitution 
of  the  United  States,  if  faithfully  honored,  blot  out  slavery 
from  every  State  constitution,  and  every  State  upholding  a 
proposition  of  slavery  by  State  legislation,  it  being  diametri- 
cally opposite  to  a  republican  form  of  government ;  therefore, 
it  was  agreed  secretly,  as  a  compromise,  by  the  framers  of 
the  Constitution,  as  one  of  the  secret  compromises  or  implied 
guaranties,  against  liberty,  that  this  should  be  an  unexercised 
article,  or  an  unused  function  of  the  Federal  Constitution,  as 
a  sort  of  fifth  wheel  to  a  coach ;  because,  if  carried  out,  it 
would  cut  up  slavery,  root  and  branch,  in  the  old  States  then 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEESEY.  337 

made,  and  in  the  new  to  be  made.  Therefore,  says  this 
secret  compromise-keeper,  we,  at  the  session  of  Congress  in 
1845,  in  pursuance  of  our  secret  compromise  of  interpreta- 
tion of  language,  with  its  use  and  disuse,  and  under  the  sus- 
pension of  that  article  of  the  Federal  Constitution  guaran- 
teeing a  republican  form  of  government,  admitted  Florida 
as  a  State,  as  we  had  several  slave  States  before,  in  which  we 
permitted  this  Article  of  the  constitution,  guaranteeing  a 
republican  form  of  government  to  each  State,  to  be  over- 
ridden and  totally  disregarded,  as  though  it  did  not  exist ; 
and  in  the  Florida  constitution,  slavery  is  held  such  a  sacred 
and  central  right  among  her  institutions,  that  it  is  placed  out 
of  reach  and  beyond  the  control  of  her  own  legislature,  and 
that  colored  freemen  coming  into  that  State  from  Maine, 
Massachusetts,  or  other  free  States,  may  be  sold  as  slaves ; 
and  the  right  the  Constitution  guarantees  to  each  citizen  of 
one  State  in  enjoying  all  the  privileges  of  citizenship  in 
another  State,  says  our  secret  compromise-keeper,  means,  as 
it  was  understood  by  the  framers  in  the  cabalistic  catalogue, 
that  this  part  of  the  Constitution  should  never  apply  to  a 
Massachusetts  or  Rhode  Island  citizen,  if  his  great  grand- 
mother had  a  drop  of  African  blood  in  her  veins ;  and  that 
although  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  had  abolished 
attainders  in  this  country,  still,  so  far  as  free  colored  citizens 
were  concerned  in  coming  from  free  to  slave  States,  they  were 
to  be  regarded,  in  defiance  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States,  as  attainted — yes,  the  victims  of  a  colored  attainder, 
and  subject  to  the  awful  judgment  of  perpetual  slavery  for 
showing  their  colored  heads,  with  no  helmet  but  the  Federal 
Constitution  for  their  protection,  in  a  slave  State. 

And  if  the  old  State  of  New  Jersey  had  had  the  benefit  of 

the  Federal  Constitution  before  the  adoption  of  your  new 

Constitution  of  1844,  and  if  Congress  had  given  this  State 

the  practical  benefit  of  a  republican  form  of  goverment,  by 

15 


338  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

abolishing  in  Congress  your  State  slave  laws,  as  contrary  to 
a  republican  form  of  government,  it  would  not  have  been 
necessary  for  me  to  have  troubled  your  Honors,  the  legisla- 
tion of  Congress  being  paramount  to  all  State  constitutions 
and  State  legislation  on  all  points  within  its  constitutional 
jurisdiction.  And  although  the  constitution  of  a  State  may 
be  silent  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  still,  if  slaveholding  legis- 
lation dishonor  the  State  statute  book,  then  Congress  has 
jurisdiction  to  abolish  such  State  law,  as  renders  the  form  of 
that  State  government  hostile  to  a  republican  form  of  govern- 
ment. The  form  of  a  State  government  may  be  republican 
in  its  constitution,  but  legislation  may  spring  up  in  that 
State,  by  which  one  half  of  the  people  may  assume  to  own 
the  other  half,  in  direct  hostility  to  a  republican  form  of 
government,  and  the  United  States  is  then  bound,  by  some 
exercise  of  sovereign  power,  to  restore  to  the  people  of  New 
Jersey,  a  republican  form  of  government,  either  by  legisla- 
tion in  Congress  or  by  the  exercise  of  judicial  power  through 
the  Federal  or  State  judiciaries  ;  and  if  through  the  latter, 
then  I  am  in  my  proper  place  to  contend  here,  this  day,  that 
this  old  law  of  slavery  was  unconstitutional  ever  since  the 
adoption  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  as  being 
contrary  to  the  fundamental  guaranty  of  the  Republic,  and 
all  State  laws  conflicting  with  said  guaranty  of  a  republican 
form  of  government  are  null  and  void,  as  much  as  a  State 
law  violating  the  liberty  of  conscience  secured  by  the  Con- 
stitution ;  and  if  this  ground  be  a  sound  position,  the  slave 
laws  have  been  void  from  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution, 
as  being  in  direct  hostility  to  the  solemn  guaranty  in  the 
Constitution  in  favor  of  a  republican  form  of  government. 
Give  me  a  republican  form  of  government  in  the  Constitu- 
tion and  the  legislation  of  a  State,  and  I  defy  any  man  to  hold 
a  human  being  in  that  State  as  a  slave,  according  to  the  law  of 
that  country,  until  the  meaning  of  language  is  revolutionized. 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  339 

The  very  idea  of  a  Constitution  of  the  United  States  in  an 
enlarged  view  would  be  replete  with  consequences  full  of 
glorious  import  to  the  bondmen  of  this  land.  As  has  been 
said  by  me  before  in  the  course  of  this  argument,  a  Consti- 
tution springs  from  our  weakness  and  need  of  protection,  and 
is  a  covenant  of  the  whole  people  with  each  person,  and  of 
each  person  with  the  whole  people,  for  the  protection  and 
defence  of  our  natural  rights,  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness.  Is  it  possible  to  conceive  that  a  people  meet- 
ing from  their  natural  weakness,  and  after  coming  together, 
conclude  to  make  a  charter  party  of  piracy  ?  That,  although 
they  agree  to  protect  and  defend  five-sixths  of  the  people  in 
their  natural  rights,  yet,  as  it  regards  the  other  sixth,  they 
solemnly  covenant  and  guarantee,  to  give  them,  no  protec- 
tion or  advantage  therefrom,  but  covenant  to  'strip  said  one- 
sixth  of  their  natural  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness ;  and  reduce  them  to  chattels,  men-breathing- 
property,  so  that  they  would  be  infinite  losers  by  forming  a 
Constitution.  Instead  of  having  their  natural  rights  pro- 
tected, they  are  stript  of  the  right  to  themselves,  and  delivered 
over  to  masters,  who,  drunk  or  sober,  reasonable  or  unreasona- 
ble, sensible  or  foolish,  are  to  make  for  them  Constitutions 
and  laws,  in  the  height  of  passion,  prompted  by  lust,  avarice 
or  meanness,  from  hour  to  hour,  and  day  to  day,  until  life's 
end.  The  slaveholders  contend  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  secured  them  these  terrible  advantages.  If  it 
did,  and  the  adopters  had  so  understood  it,  I  do  not  believe 
a  single  State  would  have  seriously  entertained  an  idea 
of  its  adoption  for  a  single  moment,  north  of  the  State  of 
Delaware. 

To  be  sure,  we  have  lived  under  an  invisible  Constitution 
of  slaveholding  construction  for  fifty-five  years,  which  we 
have  never  seen,  but  have  often  bitterly  felt — the  good 
honest  anti-slavery  Constitution  which  should  have  gone  into 


340  ALVAN   6TEWAET. 

operation  on  the  fourth  of  March,  1789,  as  it  was  honestly 
adopted,  and  if  carried  out,  in  the  integrity  of  its  high  and 
glorious  purpose.,  would,  long  ere  this,  have  extirpated 
slavery  from  this  guilty  land,  and  made  it  the  paradise  of  the 
new  world.  But  the  government,  from  its  adoption,  has 
been  under,  as  a  general  proposition,  the  control  of  slave- 
holding  Presidents,  Vice-Presidents,  Speakers  of  the  House 
of  Representatives,  who  organize  the  legislative  power  with 
five  millions  of  whites  at  the  South,  and  ten  millions  of  whites 
in  the  North.  The  South  should  have  had  three  of  the  nine 
judges  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States,  but  they 
have  five  and  the  North  four ;  they  have  two-thirds  of  the 
foreign  ministers,  the  principal  officers  on  the  sea  and  on  the 
land.  The  South  have  furnished  the  spiracles  through  which 
the  government  has  breathed,  yes,  and  the  eyes  with  which 
it  saw,  the  ears  with  which  it  heard,  and  the  tongues  and 
pens  by  which  it  spoke  and  wrote.  It  is  no  wonder  the  ship 
lost  the  track  of  its  contemplated  voyage,  and  became  the 
abused  organ  of  a  section  of  the  land  whose  supposed  inte- 
rests prosecuted  an  implacable  war  upon  human  rights,  or  in 
other  words  the  basis  and  prosperity  of  whose  peculiar  insti- 
tutions were  quickened  into  life  by  tears  and  blood,  and 
found  their  proper  aliment  in  crushing  and  prostituting  the 
rights  of  one  half  of  their  own  population,  and  holding  human 
labor  in  contempt,  by  which  three  millions  of  their  own 
population,  being  white  men,  could  not  labor  by  the  side  of 
the  slave  without  disgrace  ;  and  they,  the  whites,  having  no 
capital  but  their  labor,  sunk  down  to  a  point  of  degradation 
but  little  above  the  slaves — no  schools,  they  became  the 
lazaroni  of  this  continent ;  while  some  forty  thousand  oli- 
garchists,  owning  most  of  the  land  and  the  slaves,  and  being 
prompted  by  ambition  and  money,  moved  by  the  common 
spirit  of  slavery,  the  true  bond  of  connection  and  source  of 
their  political  power— these  men  have  snatched  this  Consti- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  341 

tution  from  the  nation,  and  have  given  us  by  the  force  of 
suppression,  violation,  construction  and  interpretation,  com- 
mingled with  their  fanciful  guaranties  and  compromises,  a 
Constitution  as  by  them  administered,  bearing  a  faint  resem- 
blance to  the  one  given  us  by  the  fathers  of  the  Revolution, 
with  their  wounds  yet  unhealed  from  the  battle-fields  of 
freedom.  The  preamble  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  must  have  been  adopted  after  the  whole  document  had 
been  prepared  by  the  framers,  as  the  grand  exponent  of 
intention  ;  and  as  so  much  is  said  by  slaveholding  casuistry, 
I  have  often  thought  that  the  framers  of  that  instrument  had 
a  melancholy  foreboding,  that  attempts  might  be  made  by 
the  crafty  and  designing  of  an  after  age,  to  pervert  that 
document,  so  plain  and  so  full  of  good  sense  and  virtuous 
principle,  to  some  sinister  purpose  ;  therefore,  as  an  everlast- 
ing  finger-board  pointing  to  the  straight  road  of  intent,  they 
virtually  said — "  Here  we  unlock  our  hearts,  as  to  object 
and  design,  and  we  say,  Trust  not  those  who  tell  you  this 
is  not  the  truth.  This  is  our  design  :  We,  the  people  of  the 
United  States,  in  order  to  form  a  more  perfect  union,  establish 
justice,  secure  domestic  tranquillity,  provide  for  the  common 
defence  and  promote  the  general  welfare,  and  secure  the 
blessings  of  liberty,  for  us  and  our  posterity,  do  establish  and 
ordain  this  Constitution  for  the  United  States  of  America." 

What  purity  and  nobility  of  object !  How  much  have  we 
had  practically,  of  this  Constitution,  by  slaveholding  con- 
struction ?  Let  us  see  how  it  would  read  if  made  for  th*e 
object  intended  by  slaveholders  and  their  apologists,  and  as 
we  practically  see  it  administered.  "  We,  five-sixths  of  the 
people  of  the  United  States,  in  order  to  secure  a  union  among 
ourselves,  which  shall  make  the  other  sixth  curse  the  Union, 
and  to  establish  justice  for  five-sixths  by  the  most  cruel 
injustice  to  the  other  sixth  ;  to  provide  for  the  common 
defence  of  five-sixths,  by  taking  away  all  public  and  private 


342  ALT  AN   STEWART. 

defence  from  the  other  sixth;  to  promote  the  particular 
welfare  of  five-sixths  by  destroying  the  entire  welfare  of 
the  other  sixth  ;  to  secure  the  blessings  of  liberty  to  five- 
sixths  and  the  curses  of  never-ending  slavery  to  the  other 
sixth,  do  ordain  this  Constitution  for  the  United  States  of 
America." 

What  would  the  adopters  in  the  thirteen  States  have  said 
to  such  a  draft  of  a  Constitution  ?  Most  of  the  thirteen 
States,  on  organizing  the  conventions  of  1788,  for  rejection 
or  adoption,  would  have  resolved  to  have  let  the  common 
hangman  hang  this  Constitution  on  the  gallows,  with  cari- 
catures of  the  leaders  in  the  convention  of  1787,  and  closed 
the  scene  by  burning  it  up,  and  have  adjourned  sine  die. 
Another  convention  of  the  United  States  would  have  been 
called  by  an  indignant  people,  and  the  first  article  wrould 
have  abolished  slavery,  by  name,  in  the  United  States,  as  an 
everlasting  disturbing  cause,  no  longer  to  be  trusted  to  dis- 
grace our  soil. 

Many  seem  to  think,  that  we  derive  our  natural,  as  well  as 
citizen  rights,  from  a  Constitution.  That  cannot  be  so.  Our 
natural  rights  are  derived  from  our  Maker,  and  the  Constitu- 
tion is  like  a  fence  around  them  to  protect  them  from  the 
invasion  of  others.  Men  derive  title  by  letters-patent  from 
the  supreme  power  of  the  State,  to  their  land,  and  the  fence  is 
placed  around  it  to  protect  it  from  the  wandering  herd.  Con- 
stitutions may  also  be  said  to  be  of  American  origin,  and  it  is 
tvot  possible  we  were  so  corrupt  in  the  morning  of  the  science. 
To  be  sure  England  talks  of  our  Constitution  ;  she  speaks  of 
the  Magna  Charta,  obtained  by  fierce  and  ignorant  barons, 
in  the  year  1215,  with  sword  in  hand,  from  feeble  John  ; 
also  the  introduction  of  the  Protestant  religion,  by  Henry 
VIII.,  and  the  Revolution  of  1688,  and  some  other  important 
epochs  like  the  Reform  Bill,  which  added  to  the  current 
stream  of  imperial  legislation,  all  considered,  being  "  moles 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JEK8EY.  34:3 

indigesta,"  make  the  sum  and  substance  of  what  an  English- 
man  means  by  the  Constitution  of  his  country.  France  made 
several  Constitutions  during  the  political  paroxysms  and 
revolutions  of  that  curious  people,  during  the  latter  end  of 
the  eighteenth  and  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  centuries, 
but  at  last  this  gallant  people  revolved  in  a  circle  of  element 
ary  expedients,  from  1789  to  the  war  of  the  barricades  in 
1830;  making  organic  experiments,  to  collect  the  true  sense 
of  the  nation  respecting  the  safest  place  or  hands  in  which  to 
lodge  power,  from  which  the  greatest  amount  of  protection 
might  be  expected  with  the  least  burden  to  the  people. 
Different  forms  of  primal  law  were  submitted  to  the  people 
for  adoption  or  rejection. 

But  look  at  Russian,  Prussian,  German,  and  Italian  States  ; 
here  each  person  is  looking  to  imperial,  royal,  or  ducal  pre- 
rogatives, for  that  security  of  life,  liberty,  and  property,  which 
should  never  have  been  absorbed  by  the  Crown,  but  should 
always  have  constituted  a  fundamental  layer  of  human  rights, 
coming  from,  and  adopted  by  the  people,  as  their  wall  of 
defence. 

Our  colonies  were  in  the  habit  of  receiving  gifts  of  a  poli- 
tical character,  carefully  sent  over  the  Atlantic  after  them, 
in  grants,  patents,  bills  of  rights,  and  charters  ;  the  very  rights 
which  they  could  not  have  left  behind  them,  and  been  men. 
These  constitutions,  anywhere  and  everywhere,  as  a  general 
rule,  are  made  to  defend  human  rights  and  not  to  crush  them. 
The  very  idea  of  a  constitution  is  like  a  life-preserver,  made 
to  save  men  in  their  danger  in  the  water,  and  is  not  to  be 
loaded  with  lead  to  sink  them.  There  are  innumerable  modes 
by  which  human  rights  have  been  crushed,  without  calling  in 
the  very  thing  which  should  protect  them,  with  which  to 
accomplish  so  diabolical  a  purpose.  To  suppose  ships  made 
on  purpose  to  preserve  five-sixths,  and  expressly  to  drown 
the  other  sixth  who  sailed  in  them  ;  the  bridge  to  precipitate 


344  ALVAN   STEWART. 

its  sixth  passenger  over  it  into  the  river ;  is  not  more  absurd 
in  supposition,  than  to  suppose  a  United  States  Constitution 
to  be  an  instrument  of  ruin  and  destruction  to  every  sixth 
man  who  sought  its  protection.  Instead  of  an  asylum  he  finds 
it  to  be  a  dungeon  with  fetters ;  that  he  is  to  be  bereaved, 
and  his  posterity  in  all  coming  generations,  of  all  capacity  to 
have  natural  rights ;  the  forlorn  victims  of  avarice,  lust, 
cruelty,  and  contempt ;  himself,  property  owned,  and  m  the 
most  abject  form,  shorn  of  the  power  to  assert  the  strength 
heaven  gave  him  to  protect  his  most  valuable  rights.  Rights ! 
Amazing !  He  has  no  rights  but  the  right  to  be  abused,  to  be 
whipped,  to  starve,  to  sufier,  and  to  die ! !  This  idea  of  a 
constitution  being  used  as  a  death-warrant  to  execute  human 
rights,  is  a  horrid  solecism  !  incomprehensible,  yea,  a  sublime 
absurdity  ;  the  greatest  insult  ever  offered  to  the  human  un- 
derstanding ;  and  certain  men  pretend  such  is  the  Constitu- 
tion of  the  United  States. 

If  the  Constitution  was  an  animated  being,  with  reason 
and  a  voice,  and  if  you  were  to  ask  her  to  speak  and  say,  was 
she  made  to  uphold  slavery,  and  destroy  human  rights,  she 
would  answer,  "  As  to  slavery  I  know  not  what  you  mean  by 
the  word,  I  never  used  it  in  my  life  ;  I  was  born  and  brought 
into  this  world  for  the  single  purpose  of  protecting  the  rights 
of  persons,  defending  men  from  the  violations  of  their  human 
rights,  from  invasion  from  abroad,  or  forceful  wrong  on 
the  soil.  I  know  no  one  except  as  &  person  possessing  the 
rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  and  for 
their  protection  I  put  forth  my  power.  When  the  free  men 
and  women  of  this  country  are  counted  as  a  basis  of  repre- 
sentation in  Congress  and  for  Presidential  electors  (Indians  not 
taxed  excepted),  and  three-fifths  of  all  other  persons  are  to  be 
counted,  and  though  States  or  individuals  call  those  three- 
fifths,  slaves,  serfs,  or  connecting  links  beticeen  men  and  mon- 
keys, and  even  treat  them  as  such,  I  only  know  them  as  I  de 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  345 

the  rest  of  mankind — as  persons ;  my  eyes  can  only  see  men 
as  persons,  my  ears  can  only  hear  the  cry  of  men  as  persons, 
possessed  of  natural  rights.  I  cannot  be  used  to  destroy  the 
liberties  of  any  innocent  man.  It  is  not  within  the  range  of 
my  power,  unless  I  am  perverted  to  purposes  contrary  to  my 
instincts."  "  Who  dare  affirm,"  says  she,  "  that  I  guarantee 
slavery  and  make  compromises  for  its  support  ?  Oh  !"  says 
she,  "  it  is  all  false,  it  is  directly  the  reverse  ;  I  guarantee  to 
each  State  a  Republican  form  of  government,  which  confers 
the  equal  right  of  life,  liberty,  and  property  to  each  innocent 
human  being  in  each  of  the  twenty-seven  States  ;  that  is  my 
right,  my  power,  my  nature,  prerogative,  scope,  end,  and 
object  of  my  existence  ;  and  slavery  exists  in  this  country  to 
my  unutterable  confusion,  by  my  violation  direct,  and  by 
reason  of  the  people  of  this  land  having  refused  to  allow  me 
to  prostrate  slavery  through  the  judiciary  or  Congress,  under 
my  guaranty  of  a  republican  form  of  government  to  the 
States.  Persons  bound  to  service  or  labor  by  laws  of  one 
State,  I  say,  shah1  not  be  withheld,  but  shall  be  delivered  up 
on  claim  of  him  to  whom  such  service  or  labor  is  due.  Here 
I  deal  with  persons  again.  If  the  wife,  the  son,  the  daughter, 
the  apprentice,  the  prisoner  from  his  bail,  escape  into  other 
States,  I  order  all  of  these  persons  to  be  delivered  to  the 
husband,  or  the  father,  or  the  master,  or  their  bail,  to  whom 
such  labor  and  service  is  due,  and  for  this  purpose  I  am  a 
perpetual  treaty  between  the  States,  to  accomplish  these  just 
objects,  and  save  the  effusion  of  blood.  If,"  says  the  Consti- 
tution, "  a  slave  is  not  a  person  within  the  protection  which 
I  afford  to  all  persons  where  I  say  '  no  person  shall  be  de- 
prived of  life,  liberty,  or  property,  without  due  process  of 
law,'  then  he  is  a  being  I  have  no  right  to  touch  and  deliver 
up,  for  I  can  only  deliver  up  persons  bound  to,  or  who  owe 
service  or  labor  as  persons  and  not  as  slaves ;  and  if  these 
persons  are  slaves,  then  I  am  under  the  most  solemn  promise 
1.V 


34:6  ALT  AN   STEWABT. 

and  obligation  not  to  explain  away,  but  to  see  that  slave- 
persons,  if  you  please,  are  not  deprived  of  life  or  liberty, 
without  due  process  of  law,  which  must  have  been  some  dis- 
tinct adjudication  that  the  being  was  a  slave,  by  a  court, 
acting  on  the  principles  of  the  common  law.  No  such  court 
has  been  organized  in  this  land,  no  such  judgments  have  been 
rendered.  If  he  is  within  the  protection  of  the  magna  charta 
part  of  my  character,  then  I  will  not  deliver  the  man  to  his 
master,  as  you  are  pleased  to  call  him,  until  a  judgment  of 
some  kind,  showing  that  the  man  owes  service  to  another,  and 
has  been  deprived  of  his  liberty  by  due  process  of  law.  Some 
record  of  that  kind  must  be  shown,  or  I  cannot  deliver  him 
up." 

Said  Mr.  S.,  I  demand  that  these  ^persons  be  delivered  up 
to  enjoy  their  liberty,  on  the  ground  of  the  declaration  in  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  declaring  that  "  no  person 
shall  be  deprived  of  life,  liberty,  or  property,  without  due 
process  of  law.  There  is  not  a  slave  or  servant,  so  held,  of 
the  four  thousand  of  both  sorts  in  New  Jersey,  but  who  is 
entitled  to  his  liberty  by  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States. 

It  is  a  curious  and  ridiculous  idea  of  some,  that  our  fathers 
had  secret  thoughts  of  crime  against  raan,  which  they  had 
not  the  courage  to  express,  under  the  name  of  intentions, 
when  they  drafted  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States ; 
and  that  we,  out  of  respect  to  the  unrecorded,  unwritten, 
villainous  intentions,  and  wicked  wishes  of  our  venerable 
ancestors,  should  take  those  wicked  thoughts  and  unre- 
corded intentions  of  crime  against  the  rights  of  man,  as  our 
Constitution,  under  the  idea  of  intention,  rather  than  the 
beautiful  text  itself,  so  full  of  life,  liberty,  and  justice.  The 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  on  its  own  face,  is  safe, 
and  more  to  be  relied  on  to  explain  its  own  meaning  with 
justice  to  the  frainers,  adopters,  and  us,  their  posterity,  than 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  347 

all  we  could  learn  from  each  drafter  and  each  adopter,  could 
we  summon  them  before  a  court  of  justice  to  explain  it  as 
they  understood  it,  on  the  4th  of  March,  1789,  the  day  it 
went  into  operation.  To  be  sure,  if  the  adopters  ever 
thought  of  slavery,  they  did  not  think  to  name  it,  and  must 
have  supposed  it  near  its  end,  and  they  did  not  wish  to  dis- 
grace the  nation  by  the  admission  that  so  foul  and  base  a 
thing  ever  existed.  It  is  truly  lamentable  to  think  the 
human  mind  is  yet  in  such  a  low  state  of  civilization,  that 
from  this  point  to  enter  goose-hood,  would  be  elevation,  and 
that  men  should  delight  to  lay  hold  of  such  absurd  views,  as 
the  one  exposed,  to  justify  themselves  in  the  perversion  of 
that  glorious  instrument,  to  some  low  and  grovelling  purpose, 
pecuniary  or  political. 

Mr.  S.  said  that  he  felt  mortified  to  think  it  should  be 
necessary  for  him,  in  the  nineteenth  century,  to  stand  in  Re- 
publican America,  the  live-long  day,  before  one  of  the  highest 
courts  in  intellect,  learning,  and  station,  to  prove  a  human 
being  a  man,  and  not  a  thing.  The  proposition  that  the 
colored  people  of  this  State  held  in  bondage,  are  men,  born 
free  and  independent,  bythe  law  of  nature,  is  one  above  all 
demonstration,  outstrips  all  logical  deductions,  and  addresses 
itself  to  our  every  perception,  for  its  truth,  which  can  gain 
nothing  from  analogy,  and  borrow  nothing  from  illustration  ; 
comparison  cannot  aid  in  its  development,  and  similes  cannot 
make  it  more  clear  to  the  human  mind.  Antiquity  and  to- 
day utter  the  same  response.  It  is  the  same  yesterday,  to- 
day, and  forever.  Every  degree  of  latitude  and  longitude 
renders  the  same  verdict,  whether  at  Timbuctoo  or  at  Tren- 
ton ;  whether  in  mind  or  in  body,  for  time  or  eternity,  they 
are  men  and  women,  creatures  of  hope,  gazing  on  the  same 
bright,  strong,  beautiful,  and  ancient  heavens,  on  which 
Adam,  and  Solomon,  and  Daniel,  and  Paul,  Copernicus,  and 
Columbus,  turned  their  admiring  eyes  ;  the  frames  of  colored 


348  ALVAN   STEWART. 

men,  their  human  countenance  divine,  containing  the  same 
unerased  lineaments,  vindicating,  in  celestial  heraldry,  the 
grandeur  of  their  descent,  the  greatness  of  their  origin — 
showing  that  God  is  their  father,  that  all  men  are  brethren  of 
one  blood ;  that  the  sweets  of  life,  the  joy  of  liberty,  the  hope 
and  pursuit  of  happiness,  are  the  gifts  of  the  Great  Father, 
to  all,  and  each  of  his  children,  with  a  power  and  privilege 
forever  to  climb  the  ascending  heights  of  eternity,  through 
the  merits  of  His  Son,  increasing  in  happiness  and  knowledge, 
through  the  endless  day  of  Heaven. 

The  greatest  announcement  affecting  the  interests  of  man 
ever  made  since  the  advent  of  the  Redeemer,  was  the 
synopsis  of  the  rights  of  man,  made  by  the  immortal  signers 
of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  on  the  4th  day  of 
July,  1776. 

The  announcement  was  antagonistic  to  the  opinions  of  all 
former  ages,  and  the  then  existing  powers  of  this  world. 
Russell,  Sidney,  Milton,  Cromwell,  and  Locke,  were  per- 
mitted to  ascend  the  mount  of  Discovery,  and  behold,  as  by 
prophetic  sight,  in  the  land  of  the  setting  sun,  beyond  the 
vast  Atlantic,  a  people  asserting  what  these  philosophers  be- 
lieved ;  that  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and  possessed 
of  certain  inalienable  rights,  amongst  which  were  life,  liberty, 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  What  they  hoped  for  man, 
we  have  seen  and  heard.  "When  this  sublime  declaration 
was  made  on  the  4th  of  July,  1776,  it  was  high  treason,  and 
political  atheism,  in  every  other  government  on  earth. 

To  all  other  governments  with  birth-born  kings,  birth-born 
legislators,  birth-born  judges,  this  declaration  of  the  Ameri- 
can Revolutionists  was  a  thousand  times  more  formidable 
than  war  or  revolution  itself.  This  was  a  great  fundamental 
proposition,  placing  all  men  on  a  level,  and  as  equals,  on  the 
start  of  the  journey  of  existence;  stating  the  value,  the 
riches  of  their  elemental  capital,  which  no  insolvency  could 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  349 

divest,  no  bankruptcy  carry  away.  Slavery,  or  the  inherit- 
able dominion  of  man  over  man,  with  its  complicated  train 
of  truckling  dependencies,  artificial  distinctions,  the  iron- 
railing  of  caste,  were  in  one  day,  by  the  great  proposition  of 
the  4th  of  July,  struck  down  as  false  in  principle.  This  was 
the  sentiment  of  a  New  World,  and  the  signers  of  the 
great  human  being  postulatum,  spoke  for  themselves,  and 
the  unborn  nations  of  this  broad  continent,  respecting  this 
great  Americanism  of  the  new  hemisphere.  The  glorious 
sound  went  careering  through  the  world,  that  all  men  are 
created  free  and  equal.  The  Massachusetts  slave  heard  its 
music,  and  joined  in  the  chorus,  and  his  freedom  was  con- 
fessed. The  slaves  of  New  York  and  Pennsylvania  listened 
to  the  joyful  acclaim  ;  the  man-chattel  of  New  Hampshire 
caught  the  still  small  voice,  and  joined  in  thanks  to  heaven, 
that  all  were  free.  Congress  caught  the  sound,  and  said,  the 
African  slave  trade  should  cease  on  our  part  forever,  and  that 
no  slave  should  tread  the  States  of  Ohio,  Illinois,  Indiana, 
Michigan,  and  the  territories  of  Wisconsin  and  Iowa.  The 
angel  of  deliverance  flew  with  the  mighty  scroll  in  her  right 
hand  over  valley  and  mountain  to  the  vast  lands  of  Mexico, 
and  proclaimed  from  the  summit  of  her  smoking  volcanoes, 
that  all  men  were  born  free  and  equal ;  and  in  one  day, 
50,000  black  slaves,  and  two  millions  of  enslaved  Indians,  in 
their  repartimientos,  in  the  mountains,  in  the  mines,  in  the 
workshops,  and  on  the  roads,  in  their  chains,  heard  the  glo- 
rious decree,  and  they  all  in  chorus  joined,  and  sung,  "  that 
all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,"  and  in  that  instant  they 
stood  up  free.  The  angel  cried  again  in  Guatemala  and 
Peru,  from  the  depth  of  the  blue  heavens,  "  that  all  men 
were  created  free."  The  black  and  red  slave  heard  his 
voice,  from  the  mountain  and  the  mine,  the  hill  and  the  hol- 
low, that  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and  their  fet- 
ters fell  from  their  delivered  hands  as  they  lifted  them  to 


350  ALVAN    STEWART. 

heaven;  and  then  they  sung,  "  all  men  are  created  free  and 
equal,"  for  they  were  free. 

Along  upon  the  mighty  Andes  the  angel  flew,  and  from 
Chimborazo's  icy  top,  she  cried  again  so  loud  and  long  that 
the  tens  of  thousands  of  poor  bondsmen  of  Chili  heard,  some 
in  those  unvisited  regions,  subterranean,  damp,  dreary, 
digging  gold  ore  and  veins  of  silver  far  under  the  floor  of 
the  roaring  Pacific,  who  never  saw  light ;  while  others  were 
delving  in  the  depths  and  bowels  of  the  Andes,  to  satisfy  the 
accursed  thirst  for  gold  ;  others  in  smelting-houses  loaded 
with  chains  ;  others  driving,  as  serfs,  their  master's  flocks  of 
goats  and  sheep  on  the  mountain's  side,  and  the  loaded  mule 
along ;  others  with  loads  upon  their  heads,  in  the  rounds  of 
common  life,  who  wore  out  their  being  for  thankless  masters ; 
others  to  galleys  chained;  others  bound  to  posts,  whose 
backs  were  being  scourged ;  others  in  a  deferential  form 
were  listening  to  the  raging  words  of  graceless  masters.  All 
heard  the  long,  the  loud  trumpet  sound,  "  that  all  men  were 
created  free  and  equal."  All  around  the  whips  and  fetters 
fell,  and  in  one  joyful  hour,  in  tune,  up  went  the  glorious 
chorus  of  response  from  men  who  were  slaves  no  more,  who 
said  and  sung  "  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal."  The 
joyful  proclamation,  by  the  angel  made,  and  the  sublime 
chorus,  and  Humanity's  reply,  rolled  over  the  great  mountain, 
and  down  its  eastern  slant,  and  the  slaves  of  Guayaquil, 
Colombia,  Venezuela,  and  Bolivia,  learnt  to  sing  the  holy 
notes,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal ;"  and  in  one 
day  deliverance  came  to  all  these  sons  of  sorrow  and  of  toil. 
The  angel  then  to  the  West  Indies  flew,  and  the  men  of  Hayti 
said,  throughout  that  island,  all  men  are  free,  and  one  million 
stood  up  enfranchised  ;  the  anthem  of  deliverance  was  sung 
in  each  British  Isle  on  the  1st  of  August,  1838,  and  800,000 
slaves  in  one  moment  became  800,000  British  freemen.  The 
angel  flew  to  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  and  sung  her  celestial 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  351 

song,  and  in  one  day  100,000  bondmen  cried  from  the  Cape 
inland  600  miles  east  and  west,  from  sea  to  sea,  "  we  all  are 
free."  The  angel  balanced  on  her  pinions,  flew  and  cried  in 
the  ears  of  the  Bey  of  Tunis,  and  in  the  Egyptian  Ali  Pasha's, 
"that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal."  These  sons  of 
Mahomet  heard,  and  the  Heaven-made-decree  obeyed,  and 
in  those  lands  of  darkness  and  of  death,  in  one  day  each  slave 
cried  out,  "I am  free!  I  am  free!"  On  the  1st  of  April, 
1844,  the  angel  of  peace  and  good  will  toward  men,  blew  a 
louder  and  longer  blast  than  she  ever  yet  had  done ;  it  was 
heard  over  the  hundred  millions  of  East  Indies,  saying,  "  all 
men  were  created  free  and  equal."  In  a  moment  the  here- 
ditary serf,  the  caste-marked  million,  and  slaves  by  descent, 
for  ages,  in  all  12,000,000  told,  started  into  life  and  joy, 
amidst  rattling  chains  and  broken  fetters  falling  from  them, 
their  eyes  streaming  with  tears,  grateful  to  Heaven  as  they 
flowed,  and  they  all  joined  in  the  glorious  song  which  they 
now  sung,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free,"  and  "  that  they 
were  slaves  no  more  !" 

We  live  in  an  abolition  age,  when  the  dungeons  which 
have  incarcerated  suffering  humanity  are  being  broken  in 
and  unlocked,  in  every  corner  of  our  benighted  world,  and 
the  captive  bid  come  forth  ;  and  may  I  entreat  this  Honor- 
able Court  to  share  in  the  unfading  glory  of  opening  this 
castle  of  slavery,  New  Jersey,  with  the  key  of  the  new  Con- 
stitution, and  the  other  keys  I  have  the  honor  so  submit  to 
this  Court,  by  which  to  let  oppressed  men  go  free. 

Here  Mr.  S.  closed  his  opening  argument,  having  spoken 
until  six  o'clock,  p.  M. 

The  Court  adjourned  until  Thursday  morning  at  ten  o'clock.  A.  M. 
The  Court  met  at  ten  o'clock,  A.  M.,  on  the  22d  of  May,  and  Chief 
Justice  Hornblower  made  a  very  able,  eloquent,  and  affecting  address, 
to  two  fine  looking  young  men,  who  were  sentenced  to  be  executed 
in  August  next  for  the  murder  of  Parke  and  Rasner. 


352  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

At  eleven  o'clock,  A.M.,  Mr.  Zabriskie  opened  liis  argument  for  the 
defence  of  the  claimants  of  these  persons,  and  spoke  till  half  after  one, 
with  a  good  deal  of  talent  and  power.  The  Court  adjourned  until 
three  o'clock,  P.M.  Mr.  Zabriskie  resumed,  and  concluded  at  half 
after  three,  P.M. 

Mr.  Bradley,  as  counsel  for  the  claimants,  spoke  with  much  energy 
and  ingenuity  until  five  o'clock,  p.  M.,  when  he  closed. 

Mr.  Stewart  replied  from  five  o'clock,  P.M.,  to  six.  The  Court 
adjourned  until  seven,  P.M.,  and  Mr.  Stewart  spoke  from  seven,  P.M., 
until  after  ten,  and  closed. 

It  is  regretted  that  the  arguments  of  Messrs.  Zabriskie  and  Brad- 
ley could  not  have  been  given  at  length,  but  many  of  the  points 
which  they  made  will  appear  in  Mr.  Stewart's  reply.  It  is  not 
expected  we  should  report  all  Mr.  Stewart  said,  first  and  last,  in 
eleven  hours  of  delivery. 

ARGUMENT   IS   REPLY. 

Mr.  Stewart  said,  in  reply,  that  he  must  express  his  grati- 
tude to  the  learned  counsel,  for  the  kind  compliments  paid  to 
his  intellect,  by  one  who  had  given  us  so  strong  evidence, 
that  he  himself  enjoyed  the  singular  fortune  of  a  fine  mind, 
embellished  with  the  advantages  of  a  polished  education,  and 
what  he  could  not  command  from  research  he  might  still 
enjoy  by  the  power  of  reflection. 

Mr.  S.  said  the  learned  counsel  had  alluded  to  the  fact 
that  the  first  person  they  had  seen  alive,  who  was  an  Aboli- 
tionist, in  the  county  of  Bergen,  was  the  person  who  served 
these  writs  of  habeas  corpus — Mr.  Palmer — and  the  coun- 
sel gravely  informs  us  that  the  people  did  not  tar  and  feather 
him.  I  suppose  this  statement  is  made  as  a  distinguished 
compliment  to  his  neighbors  in  that  county,  and  as  the 
highest  proof  they  have  ever  given  of  their  civilization  ;  and 
it  is  to  be  hoped  they  may  never,  in  an  evil  hour,  fall  below 
this  high- water  mark  of  their  advancing  elevation. 

Mr.  Zabriskie  has  told  us,  to  frighten  and  almost  alarm  us 
out  of  this  effort  in  behalf  of  crushed  men,  and  to  make  us 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  353 

leave  these  slaves  in  the  great  man-trap,  that  if  your  honors 
shall  let  those  slaves  go  free  under  your  new  Constitution, 
the  courts  will  be  compelled  to  hear  arguments  by  wives  and 
children,  to  be  set  free  from  the  dominion  of  their  husbands 
and  parents.  The  bare  statement  of  so  strange  a  proposition 
relieves  me  from  a  reply  to  it. 

The  gentleman  has  endeavored  to  alarm  the  sensibilities  of 
the  court,  by  a  parade  of  several  distinct  orders  of  modern 
philosophers,  known  under  the  name  of  Fouriers,  Anti- 
Renters,  Socialists,  Owenites,  Fanny  Wrighters,  Non-Resis- 
tants,  and  No-Human-Government-men,  Dissolvers  of  the 
Union,  Nullifiers,  and  Infidels.  And  he  would  wish  to 
fasten  the  opinion  upon  the  court,  that  there  is  some  sort  of 
relation  between  these  philosophers'  views  and  this  dry  law 
question,  which  is,  •  whether  slavery  in  the  State  of  New 
Jersey  is  a  legal  and  lawful  institution  or  not.  I  confess  I 
cannot  discover  any  more  relation  between  the  philosophical 
dogmas  of  these  different  philosophers  and  the  question  before 
your  Honors,  than  there  is  propriety  in  the  following  question : 
"  If  it  is  two  hundred  miles  from  this  place  to  Boston,  what 
is  the  amount  of  the  first  quarter's  salary  of  the  Lord  Mayor  of 
London  ?"  I  think  when  the  pertinency  of  one  of  these  pro- 
positions is  made  manifest,  the  other  will  then  appear. 

But,  as  there  have  been  several  attempts  to  lock  and  hook 
together,  during  the  gentleman's  reply,  things  the  most 
dissimilar  and  uncongenial,  I  will  take,  if  the  court  permit,  the 
present  opportunity,  to  define  the  liberty  party  Abolitionists' 
creed,  a  body  of  men  who,  at  the  late  election,  appeared  to 
number  about  62,500  voting  men,  of  which  body  the  speaker 
was  an  humble  member.  The  liberty  party  Abolitionists,  in 
the  United  States,  had  been  a  political  party,  with  its  candi- 
dates, ever  since  April,  1840  ;  and  was  formed  from  necessity, 
to  overthrow  slavery,  after  having  tried  both  of  the  old 
parties  in  vain,  each  of  the  old  parties  having  a  slave  end  to 


354:  ALVAN   BTEWA.KT. 

it,  so  that  it  was  impossible  to  get  either  to  undertake  this 
work.  The  liberty  party  hold  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  to  be,  when  properly  interpreted,  an  anti-slavery  docu- 
ment, replete  with  tendencies  in  favor  of  freedom ;  but  that 
the  slaveholding  portion  of  this  country  have  seized  upon  the 
reins  of  government,  and  perverted  the  Constitution's  high 
intent,  to  the  base  purposes  of  sustaining,  and  increasing  the 
power  of  slaveholders  in  every  possible  way,  and  have  violated 
the  Constitution  by  employing  it  to  sanction  slavery  in  many 
ways,  and  in  the  overthrow  of  the  right  of  petition.  The  lib- 
erty party  Abolitionists  mean  to  employ  the  Constitution, 
and  in  pursuance  of  its  authority,  and  not  contrary  thereto, 
to  overthrow  slavery  in  every  way,  and  by  all  lawful  means. 
We  mean,  as  a  body,  and  it  is  a  part  of  our  creed,  to  cling 
to  the  Union  or  Confederacy  under  all  circumstances,  and 
never  give  it  up ;  slavery  in,  or  slavery  out,  Texas  in  or  Texas 
out :  we  hold  on  to  the  Union  and  every  acre  of  its  soil, 
whether  it  be  the  sands  of  Georgia  or  the  mountains  of  Ver- 
mont, for  the  exaltation,  purification,  and  enfranchisement  of 
this  land  from  slavery,  root  and  branch.  It  is  a  cardinal 
principle  from  the  beginning,  never  to  vote  for  a  slaveholder, 
or  an  apologist  of  slavery,  but  hold  it  our  duty  to  vote  at 
every  election  for  men  for  town,  county,  State,  and  national 
officers,  who  will  employ  all  lawful  power  to  banish  slavery 
from  the  nation,  for  the  sake  of  three  millions  of  slaves  com- 
pelled to  work  without  wages,  as  well  as  three  millions  of 
ignorant,  poor,  and  unschooled  whites  in  the  South,  the 
lazaroni  of  this  continent,  who  are  ruined  by  the  most  abject 
poverty,  it  being  disgraceful  for  them  to  labor  for  wages  by 
the  side  of  the  slave.  To  save  six  millions  of  human  beings 
from  ruin  or  desolation,  or  one-third  of  our  countrymen,  is 
the  exact  object  of  the  liberty  party  Abolitionists,  let  it  take 
ever  so  long  to  accomplish  it.  We  have  no  motive  for  ad- 
vancing the  one,  or  retarding  the  other  of  the  great  parties, 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  355 

as  we  mean,  in  the  end,  to  overthrow  them  both^  as  soon  as 
we  can  get  our  countrymen  to  adopt  our  belief;  we  are  law- 
abiding  and  law-sustaining  men,  and  there  is  no  more  con- 
nection between  the  liberty  party  Abolitionists,  and  the  list 
of  philosophers  just  enumerated,  than  there  is  between  the 
Chinese  wall  and  the  Erie  canal.  "We  believe  in  short,  a  man 
has  a  better  right  to  his  own  wife  and  children,  than  any 
other  man,  and  we  suppose  the  curse  of  slavery  has,  as  a  mass, 
nearly  ruined  the  men  of  the  South,  as  well  as  the  land  of  the 
slave  States,  and  we  wish  to  improve  and  cave  our  country 
and  our  people,  by  our  party  organization.  And  my  apology 
to  the  court  for  this  statement,  defining  our  position,  is  the 
attempt  to  injure  and  dishonor  as  high-minded  and  pure  a 
body  of  men  as  breathe,  by  making  them  keep  company  with 
those  philosophers,  however  respectable  they  may  be ;  yet 
we  have  not  chosen  their  society,  or  opinions,  in  the  prose- 
cution of  our  enterprise. 

The  counsel  of  defendant,  has  attacked  New  York  for  call- 
ing a  State  convention.  I  can  see  nothing  ULTRA  or  radical, 
once  in  a  quarter  of  a  century,  in  a  State's  reviewing  the 
ground  it  has  passed  over,  and  thus  lay  hold  of  the  improve- 
ments tune  suggests,  or  brings  to  light,  for  perfecting  her 
great  social  edifice.  The  old  way  to  amend  the  fabric  of 
government  in  Europe,  was  on  the  battle-field,  amidst  the 
clangor  of  arms  and  roar  of  artilery,  with  bullets  for  yeas, 
and  cannon  balls  for  nays.  I  confess  I  much  prefer  the  mode 
adopted  by  the  State  of  New  York. 

The  learned  counsel,  to  get  rid  of  the  force  of  the  first 
article  of  the  new  Constitution  of  this  State,  says  it  is  a  mere 
abstraction,  a  rhetorical  flourish,  and  is  not  a  part  of  the  Con- 
stitution, in  reality,  not  binding  us  to  do  anything.  I  should 
like  to  know  where  I  am  to  begin  to  read  the  new  Constitu- 
tion, and  how  much  of  it  is  to  be  rejected  as  surplusage. 

The  other  counsel,  Mr.  Bradley,  says  this  section  of  the 


356  ALVAN   STEWART. 

Constitution  is  a  mere  braggadocio,  a  mere  telling  England 
that  all  men  are  free  and  independent  by  nature,  and  it  is  so 
said,  to  let  England  know  that  our  people  know  that  we  are 
as  good  as  her  Lords  and  Commons,  Kings  and  Queens,  and 
that  it  grew  out  of  our  revolutionary  jealousy,  of  our  own 
importance,  when  we  first  inserted  it  in  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  This  is  queer  indeed  !  New  Jersey,  in  her 
old  Constitution,  made  two  days  before  the  Declaration  of 
Independence,  was  perfectly  silent  then ;  when  the  reason 
for  bragging  might  have  operated,  she  is  very  meek  then  / 
not  one  word  is  said  about  human  rights ;  but  68  years 
afterward,  in  September,  1844,  when  all  danger  is  forever 
past,  according  to  the  gentleman,  New  Jersey  sticks  up 
her  bristles,  and  says,  "  I  would  have  you  know,  old  England, 
yes,  old  John  Bull,  and  you  Miss  Victoria  Guelph,  and  Mr. 
Albert  Coburg,  that  we  are  as  good  by  nature,  and  as  inde- 
pendent as  any  of  you,  yes,  that  we  be."  But  the  sober- 
minded,  brave,  and  considerate  Jerseyman  never  had  such 
a  thought  pass  through  his  mind,  at  the  time  he  voted  for  its 
adoption.  He  had  too  much  regard  for  his  own  dignity,  and 
too  much  respect  for  England,  to  employ  himself  in  such  a 
miserable  small  game  of 'swelling  and  surf -making,  to  elevate 
the  character  of  his  country.  The  noble-minded  Jerseyman 
is  willing  that  other  countries  should  amuse  themselves  with 
the  baubles  of  kings,  queens,  and  lords,  as  national  dolls  and 
playthings,  without  considering  himself  undervalued  in  the 
least  by  not  being  used  for  the  same  puerile  and  harmless 
purpose  by  his  own  countrymen  ;  and  the  last  place  in  the 
world  he  would  seek  to  curl  the  lip  of  scorn,  would  be  in  his 
own  great  fundamental  and  organic  law,  asserting  his  own 
freedom,  dignity,  and  independence. 

Mr.  Bradley  contends  that  Moses'  law  sanctioned  slavery, 
and  the  buying  the  heathen  around  about  for  money.  Yes, 
there  was  a  kind  of  servitude  which  looks  like  buying  the 


SLAVERY   IN    NEW   JERSEY.  357 

heathen  by  those  ancient  Jews  for  money.  But  the  Jewish 
government  was  a  theocracy,  and  every  law,  decree,  or  order 
of  government,  began  with  "  Thus  saith  the  Lord,"  as  a 
standing  formula ;  whether  the  document,  law,  or  proclama- 
tion, came  from  the  elders,  a  king,  a  general,  or  a  high-priest, 
from  a  good  man,  or  bad  one,  whoever  had  occasion  to 
employ  the  character  of  the  government,  as  that  was  a 
theocracy,  and  these  rulers  always  used  "  Thus  saith  the 
Lord,"  as  a  universal  preface  to  the  law.  All  of  Moses'  laws 
were  not  from  God ;  but  Moses'  system  was  a  code  of  parti- 
culars, some  from  God  and  others  from  man.  The  Saviour 
settles  this  question  in  the  case  of  that  laAv  of  Moses,  by 
which  a  man  might  live  with  his  wife,  a  month  after  mar- 
riage, and  if  he  did  not  like  her,  then  give  her  a  bill  of 
divorcement,  and  send  her  away,  however  virtuous  and 
worthy.  The  Saviour  says,  "  Moses  suffered  it  from  the  hard- 
ness of  your  hearts,  it  was  not  so  in  the  beginning,"  etc. 
Now,  this  month  divorce ;  the  case  of  a  Jew  being  per- 
mitted to  take  a  cow,  or  an  ox,  which  had  suddenly  died,  to 
the  gates  of  the  city,  and  there  sell  it  to  the  heathen  and 
strangers  to  eat  (forbidding  the  Jews  to  cut  it),  also  the  case 
of  taking  interest  of  the  heathen,  and  none  of  a  Jew,  are 
instances.  Polygamy  is  a  fourth  case,  and  the  fifth  is  a  man's 
making  his  captive  into  a  wife,  living  with  her  as  long  as  he 
pleased,  and  then  setting  her  adrift,  as  in  the  21st  chapter  of 
Deuteronomy ;  all  of  these  cases  have  thus  "  Saith  the  Lord," 
as  much  as  good  laws.  These  laws  Moses  suffered  this 
ignorant  people  to  adopt  as  a  matter  of  expediency,  but  they 
were  not  the  laws  of  God,  but  are  properly  recorded,  as  our 
laws  formerly  in  New  York  wrere,  in  favor  of  lotteries,  and 
regulating  Long  Island  horse-races.  But  the  terrible  injus- 
tice of  these  laws,  proves  that  man  was  their  author,  and  not 
God  ;  but  they  are  recorded  under  the  general  appeDation  of 


358  ALVAN    STEWART. 

"Thus  saith  the  Lord,"  because  the  government  was  a 
Theocracy.  This  view,  Mr.  S.  believed  necessary,  to  vindi- 
cate the  purity  and  glory  of  God.  There  was  a  law  of 
heavenly  origin  which  said,  "whoso  stealeth  a  man  shall 
surely  die  or  be  put  to  death,"  which  form  he  did  not  recol- 
lect, and  is  found  in  these  same  chapters.  He  did  not  see  how 
that  law  of  God  could  be  reconciled  with  American  slavery ; 
for  every  man  and  woman,  or  his  or  her  ancestor,  had  been 
stolen  in  this  country.  Again,  if  slavery  is  a  Bible  and 
heavenly  institution,  we  should  not  be  opposed  to  it  in  the 
abstract,  as  the  defendant's  counsel  are,  but  everything 
should  be  done  to  foster  and  encourage  it,  and  their  Honors 
should  resign  their  seats  rather  than  decide  in  Mr.  S.'s  favor, 
however  plain  the  new  Constitution  or  other  thing  might  be 
for  the  slave ;  for  if  the  Bible  countenances  slavery,  it  is 
abstractly  right,  and  the  plaintiff's  counsel  commit  a  great 
sin  in  opposing  slavery  in  the  abstract,  which  they  intend  to 
atone  for  by  going  with  all  their  might  for  it  practically,  and 
thus  purge  themselves  for  opposing,  what  the  Bible  sustains, 
in  the  abstract  and  concrete.  If  it  is  a  Bible  institution, 
which  we  have  been  abolishing  in  New  England,  New  York, 
and  Pennsylvania,  let  us  repent  in  dust  and  ashes,  and  run 
down  all  the  colored,  the  weak,  the  young,  the  Irish,  the 
English,  and  the  strangers  on  their  first  arrival ;  and  catch 
our  few  suffering  Indians,  who  are  still  straggling  as  wan- 
derers among  their  fathers'  graves,  and  make  them  all  into 
slaves,  and  their  posterity  in  the  free  States  ;  and  thus  secure 
the  blessings  of  Heaven,  that  are  poured  out  so  bountifully 
on  Virginia,  Maryland,  and  the  Carolinas. 

Mr.  S.  said  that  of  all  remarkable  arguments  for  ingenuity, 
he  had  heard  one  urged  by  both  of  his  learned  and  ingenious 
adversaries,  and,  in  fact,  the  main  one,  on  which  they  sought 
to  continue  the  institution  of  slavery,  in  this  State,  which 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  359 

surprised,  yes,  astonished  him,  by  its  subtlety  and  cruelty. 
In  the  1st  section  of  the  10th  Article  of  the  new  Constitution 
of  New  Jersey,  among  other  things,  it  says : 

"  The  common  law  and  statute  laws  now  in  force,  and  not  repug* 
nant  to  this  Constitution,  shall  remain  in  force  until  they  expire  by 
their  own  limitation,  or  be  altered  or  repealed  by  the  legislature ; 
and  all  writs,  actions,  causes  of  action,  prosecutions,  contracts, 
claims,  and  rights  of  individuals,  and  of  bodies  corporate,  and  of  the 
State,  and  all  charters  of  incorporation,  shall  continue,  and  all  in- 
dictments which  shall  have  been  found,  or  may  hereafter  be  found 
for  any  crime  or  offence  committed  before  the  adoption  of  this 
Constitution,  may  be  proceeded  upon,  as  though  no  change  had  taken 
place." 

The  point  the  defendant's  counsel  would  raise,  is  this ;  ad- 
mitting that  the  new  Constitution  has  abolished  the  old  slave 
laws,  root  and  branch,  as  being  "  repugnant"  to  the  new  Con- 
stitution ;  still  under  the  name  of  "  claims  and  rights  of  indi- 
viduals" which  "  should  continue,"  the  rights  of  master  and 
slave  are  both  preserved  in  the  1st  section  of  the  10th  Arti- 
cle of  the  new  Constitution  under  the  head  of  "  rights  pre- 
served," as  defendant's  counsel  contend.  The  counsel  fur- 
ther contend  for  defendant,  that  it  is  good  law  without  such 
saving  clause  in  the  Constitution  ;  and  that  all  rights  are  pre- 
served, notwithstanding  a  constitution,  hostile  to  them  on  its 
face,  has  abolished  the  laws  which  created  the  rights,  in  so 
many  words,  totldem  verbis.  I  deny  these  propositions,  in 
toto,  as  applied  to  a  case  of  slavery.  Reserved  rights  !  They 
would  be  reserved  wrongs  !  and  upon  that  principle  a  State 
could  not  abolish  slavery;  as  for  instance,  suppose  South 
Carolina  makes  a  new  Constitution,  and  abolishes  slavery, 
and  with,  or  without  a  reservation  of  the  rights  of  the  citi- 
zens ;  according  to  the  argument  we  hear,  the  rights  of  the 
master  are  all  taken  up  and  preserved  in  the  new  Constitu- 
tion, to  the  services  of  the  slaves  ;  the  rights  of  sale  of  labor, 


360  ALVAN   STEWART. 

or  sale  of  slaves,  or  their  offspring,  are  the  same  as  before. 
They  alter  this  Constitution  again,  and  re-assert,  ten  years 
afterward,  that  slavery  shall  never  exist  in  South  Carolina ; 
but  the  planter  smiles  at  the  imbecility  of  the  Convention,  and 
says,  "although  they  have  for  the  second  time  abolished 
slavery  by  the  Constitution,  and  all  laws  which  maintain  it, 
yet  according  to  the  arguments  of  the  defendant's  counsel, 
in  New  Jersey,  my  rights  are  all  preserved  to  the  slaves,  and 
that  is  all  I  ask ;"  and  furthermore,  says  he,  "  it  is  curious  to 
see  how  the  body  of  this  glorious  institution  of  slavery  sur- 
vives its  own  decapitation.  They  cannot,"  says  he,  "  abolish 
slavery,  even  in  a  constitution  made  on  purpose,  but  the  Di- 
vine rights  of  slavery  will  survive,  and  ride  careering  over 
all  human  attempts  at  their  annihilation  ;  and  what,"  says  the 
South  Carolina  planter,  "  is  the  peculiar  beauty  of  this  pro- 
position, is,  that  by  the  universal  admission  of  all  jurists, 
slavery  can  only  exist  by  positive  law,  for  its  support  ;  but  I 
have  now  discovered  how  it  may  exist  not  only  without  posi- 
tive law  for  its  support,  but  in  deadly  opposition  to  the  most 
stringent  organic  Constitutional  Law,  for  its  entire  abolition 
and  express  destruction."  Once  in  a  nation,  and  adopted  by 
law,  no  form  of  law  can  banish  it,  as  it  lives  under  the  name 
of  a  "  right  preserved ;"  yes,  it  lives  and  flourishes  with  an 
endless  life.  It  is  the  real  "  live-for-ever."  Yes,  if  this  argu- 
ment is  sound,  the  most  monstrous  wrong  in  the  universe,  for 
whose  destruction  a  new  Constitution  was  expressly  made, 
flourishes  and  prevails  ;  yes,  lo !  the  melancholy  spectacle  is 
presented  to  the  astonished  world,  that  although  the  laws  sus- 
taining slavery  are  all  abolished,  yet  slavery  has  a  more  solemn 
and  formidable  protection,  as  a  reserved  right,  than  it  ever 
had  before,  and  that  too  in  the  bosom  of  its  own  executioner. 
The  counsel,  I  have  no  doubt,  hopes  the  shrewdness  of  this 
argument  will  be  its  apology  for  want  of  solidity.  The  mas- 
ter never  had  a  single  just  right  to  the  slave,  and  the  Consti- 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW  JERSEY.  361 

tution  no  more  preserves  any  for  him,  than  it  does  the  turn- 
pike for  highwaymen,  the  treasure  in  my  house  for  a  thief, 
or  the  thoughtless  young  heir  for  a  prey  to  blacklegs  and 
sharpers. 

After  this  view  of  this  question  has  been  taken,  I  shall  con- 
sider the  concession  virtually  made,  that  slavery  is  repugnant 
to  the  new  Constitution ;  that  the  Massachusetts  decision  ends 
this  cause,  if  good  authority. 

But  slavery  has  been  spoken  of  by  the  defendant's  counsel 
with  great  respect.  I  regard  it  as  the  curse  of  the  nation. 
Virginia,  at  the  time  of  the  first  census,  in  1790,  had  more 
than  double  the  inhabitants  of  the  State  of  New  Yoi-k :  now 
it  is  sadly  reversed,  New  York  has  about  double  that  of  Vir- 
ginia. Virginia,  with  nearly  double  the  territory  of  New 
York,  and  more  good  land  than  New  York,  situated  in  the 
most  benignant  climate  to  be  found  under  the  bright  heavens, 
penetrated  with  large  bays,  and  beautiful,  noble,  and  naviga- 
ble rivers,  stretching  to  the  metropolis  of  our  land,  washed 
by  the  Ohio ;  no  land  whose  mountains  are  more  ready  to 
burst  with  their  mineral  wealth  than  hers ;  whose  lead,  iron, 
coal,  and  copper,  He  hoarded  in  those  beautiful  mountains,  in 
value  beyond  the  computations  of  numbers,  or  the  dreams  of 
avarice.  But  that  wealth  shall  never  be  explored,  raised,  or 
enjoyed  by  the  palsied  arm  qf  slavery.  No,  it  is  reserved  for 
the  vigor  of  the  freeman's  strength  ;  not  dishonored  by  the 
blight  of  unpaid  labor  :  those  treasures  will  only  come  at  the 
call  of  honored  and  free  labor. 

Look  at  hundreds  of  thousands  of  acres  of  fair  and  valuable 
land  in  Western  Virginia,  which  would  make  noble  farms, 
when  free  labor  shall  be  honored,  now  sold  at  six  cents,  ten 
cents,  and  twenty-five  cents  an  acre.  Look  at  hundreds  of 
old  farms  within  forty  and  fifty  miles  of  Washington,  to  be 
sold  from  $4  to  $10  per  acre,  with  their  dilapidated  buildings, 
covered  with  mortgages  and  trust  deeds ;  the  same  land, 
16 


362  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

slavery  abolished,  and  freemen  to  cultivate,  would  be  worth 
from  $30  to  $80  per  acre.  Look  at  whole  regions  and  por- 
tions of  counties  abandoned,  as  commons,  in  old  Eastern 
Virginia,  where  you  may  ride  for  hours,  without  meeting  an 
inhabitant  in  the  lower  counties  of  this  State,  land  yet  beau- 
tiful, if  its  powers  of  fecundity  were  truly  developed  by  free- 
men, once  the  seats  of  joyful  hospitality  of  the  last  century, 
now  as  silent  as  the  ruins  of  Palmyra  and  Babylon.  The 
young  growth  of  timber  coming  up,  the  wild  animals  resum- 
ing their  ancient  dominion,  the  traveller  from  the  old  world, 
as  he  measured  his  lonely  steps  over  these  forsaken  abodes  of 
men,  would  inquire  what  desolating  wars  have  consumed  the 
sons  and  daughters  of  this  fair  land  ?  in  what  chronicles  shall 
it  be  found,  or  what  more  than  Egyptian  plague  has  been 
and  bereaved  these  uncultivated  lands  of  their  proprietors,  and 
has  left  the  fox  to  come  in  at  the  window,  and  the  owl  to 
hoot  at  noon,  and  appointed  the  stork,  the  raven,  the  cormo- 
rant and  bittern,  to  perform  the  hospitalities  of  these  dilapi- 
dated homes  of  departed  men  f  Alas !  the  curse  of  the  slave's 
foot-print  has  been  here,  unrewarded  toil  has  been  here,  in- 
alienable rights  have  been  cloven  down  here,  man  has  ranked 
with  the  ox,  in  the  market,  here  ;  marriage  rights  were  trod- 
den under  foot  here  ;  the  father  who  begot,  and  the  mother 
who  bore  the  son  and  the  daughter,  had  no  rights  in  their 
children  here  ;  men  had  no  right  to  cultivate  their  immortal 
minds  here ;  justice  and  mercy  had  no  abode  here ;  free 
labor  was  dishonored  here  ;  the  lash,  the  fetter  and  the  chain 
ruled  here  ;  and  at  last,  hunger  expelled  the  oppressor  from 
his  home  here. 

The  splendid  and  princely  plantation  of  George  Washing- 
ton, the  Father  of  his  country,  presents,  in  forty-five  years, 
one  of  the  most  melancholy  and  remarkable  instances  of  that 
ceaseless  vigilance  of  Providence,  which  pursues  injustice 
with  unerring  certainty,  from  year  to  year,  and  at  last  over- 


SLAVEET   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  363 

takes  and  awards  the  punishment  affixed  to  fundamental 
violations  of  the  great  rights,  which  the  Father  of  all  has  hi 
the  welfare  of  his  abused  children. 

Thousands  of  acres,  and  money  in  vast  amount,  united  in 
the  official  station  of  President ;  this  plantation  lying  within 
some  ten  or  twelve  miles  from  the  three  beautiful  cities  of 
Georgetown,  Washington  and  Alexandria,  partly  surrounded 
by  the  majestic  Potomac  River,  bearing  on  its  commercial 
bosom  ships  from  the  ends  of  the  world,  freighted  with  every 
human  want ;  this  plantation  was  ready  to  ship  at  its  own 
door,  every  redundancy  it  bore,  at  remunerating  prices.  The 
ambition  of  General  Washington  during  the  last  years  of  his 
retirement,  was,  to  make  this  favored  place,  with  his  hundred 
slaves,  his  abounding  Avealth,  the  great  pattern  plantation  of 
this  continent.  Having  done  much  to  see  his  high  purpose 
accomplished,  in  December,  1799,  he  died,  having  emanci- 
pated his  slaves  by  his  will.  Judge  Bushrod  Washington, 
his  nephew,  with  a  large  family  of  slaves,  with  a  salary  of 
$4,500  from  the  United  States  as  judge  for  life,  succeeded  his 
illustrious  uncle;  and  in  1819  or  thereabouts,  made  a  large 
sale  of  some  thirty  to  fifty  slaves,  being  near  one-half.  The 
nation  was  incensed  at  the  act ;  his  public  apology  was,  that 
he  was  compelled  to  sell  part  to  support  the  rest,  and  thus 
the  process  of  anthropophagi,  or  man  eating  man,  indirectly 
commenced ;  the  cultivation  was  miserable  and  the  bushes 
encroached ;  some  fields,  by  1828  or  1829,  at  the  time  of  the 
judge's  death,  began  to  be  given  up.  John  A.  Washington, 
the  nephew  of  the  judge,  succeeds  ;  the  woods  still  gained ; 
field  after  field,  under  slave  and  master's  cultivation,  went 
back  to  primeval  forest.  At  about  1839  or  1840,  Colonel 
Washington  died,  and  in  the  month  of  April  or  May,  1842, 
the  widow  and  her  children  were,  like  Adam  and  Eve,  from 
Paradise  driven  out,  "  Great  Burnam  Wood  had  come  to 
Dunsinane "  as  in  Macbeth ;  the  door  was  locked,  the  gate 


364  ALVAN   STEWART. 

was  shut,  slavery's  curse  and  the  wilderness  had  expelled 
them  from  this  ancient  home  of  America's  great  man.  This 
is  slavery,  sooner  or  later,  everywhere ;  the  curse  of  Heaven 
is  upon  it. 

It  would  be  a  fraud  on  the  people  of  New  Jersey,  so  to 
construe  their  new  Constitution,  as  the  defendant's  counsel 
had  contended.  There  was  not  one  in  fifteen  of  the  seventy- 
thousand  who  voted  for  its  adoption,  who  would  not  glory 
and  feel  elevated  by  the  act.  To  see  these  poor  bondmen 
and  their  children  free,  must  be  matter  of  joy  to  all.  The 
argument  that  they  would  not  be  so  well  off,  is  too  stale  to 
be  used,  in  1845,  in  New  Jersey.  For  if  the  argument 
proves  anything  it  proves  too  much,  and  that  it  would  be 
better  for  the  great  mass  of  mankind  to  be  slaves,  and  that  it 
is  a  desirable  institution.  On  that  point  I  have  no  more  to 
say  except  that  those  who  believe  such  doctrines  can  easily 
put  themselves  and  families  in  possession  of  its  blessings,  as 
several  of  the  slave  States  are  so  kind  as  not  to  refuse  to 
those  of  Anglo-Saxon  descent  the  peculiar  privileges  of  that 
pleasant-spoken  institution. 

To  illustrate  one  of  the  abhorrent  features  of  the  institution 
in  the  slave  States,  Mr.  Stewart,  adverting  to  one  of  the 
positions  of  the  opposite  counsel,  supposed  the  following 
case  :  An  old  man,  said  he,  whom  we  will  call  Tinkem,  lived 
in  Trenton,  once  upon  a  time,  and  not  being  long  for  this 
world,  called  his  ten  sons  around  him  and  told  them,  My 
sons,  I  have  but  little  to  give  you  of  worldly  property,  and, 
therefore,  in  order  to  start  the  five  oldest  of  you  comfortably 
in  this  life,  I  give  each  of  them  one  of  their  five  younger 
brothers,  to  be  his  property— in  other  words,  his  slave  for 
life,  and  his  posterity  after  him.  And  you,  the  five  youngest 
of  my  sons,  must  be  the  slaves  of  your  elder  brothers.  I  do 
this  in  conformity  with  the  usage  of  the  citizens  of  a  large 
number  of  the  States  of  this  Union  !  But  the  eldest  son  says, 


SLAVERY   IN  NEW   JERSEY.  365 

"  Father,  what  are  the  rights  and  prerogatives  which  we 
shall,  in  that  case,  possess  over  our  slave  brothers  ?  " 

"  Oh,"  said  the  old  man,  "  you  will  reduce  them  to  chat- 
tels, or  cattle — living,  breathing  property — that  is  all.  It  is 
perfectly  legal,  and  you  will  be  protected  in  the  enjoyment 
of  your  property ;  you  are  no  longer  to  regard  them  as 
sentient  beings ;  you  are  to  deprive  them  of  all  education, 
except  the  cart- whip  instruction ;  you  are  to  make  them 
know  and  feel  that  their  every  moment  is  to  be  regulated  by 
your  wish  and  will,  and  that  they  are  subject  to  be  sold,  and 
worked,  husband  apart  from  wife,  and  wife  from  husband ; 
and  their  children  from  both.  So,  now,  my  sons,  take  your 
slaves,  and  begone ! "  Now  (continued  Mr.  Stewart),  the 
story  of  this  horrible  deed  reached  the  ears  of  the  citizens  of 
Trenton,  and  the  sanctum  of  its  editors.  A  burst  of  indigna- 
tion is  the  consequence.  Everybody  and  every  press  exclaims 
"  monster  !  monster  !  monster  !"  with  one  voice.  It  is  taken 
up  by  thepeople,  and  the  press  of  Philadelphia  and  New  York, 
and  language  grows  weak,  and  imagination  weary,  in  search- 
ing for  fitting  epithets  in  which  to  condemn  the  foul  and  damn- 
ing act  of  this  heartless  old  villain,  Tinkem  of  Trenton !  Men 
come  from  a  prodigious  distance  to  get  a  sight  of  so  much 
moral  deformity,  existing  in  a  single  man.  The  phrenologists 
come  to  examine  his  craniological  developments,  wondering 
what  manner  of  man-monster  he  can  be  ;  and  the  whole  nation 
rings  with  the  story,  and  but  one  opinion  is  expressed,  every- 
where, in  public  and  in  private — that  of  horror  and  astonish- 
ment. But,  your  Honors,  pause  in  your  honest  outburst  of 
indignation.  Old  Tinkem  stands  excused,  in  view  of  the  fact 
that  not  a  week  comes  and  goes  in  the  regions  of  the  sunny 
South,  that  does  not  furnish  a  parallel  to  this  conduct.  A 
slaveholding  father  there  gives  the  children  of  his  own  body, 
by  his  bond-woman,  to  be  slaves  for  life,  to  his  children  by 
his  free-woman — I  mean  his  wife  !  It  is  done  in  twelve 


366  ALVAN    STEWAUT. 

States  out  ol  the  seven  and  twenty  of  which  this  Union  is 
composed,  whenever  the  father  wishes  to  endow  his  heir  out 
of  his  possessions.  And  this  I  hold  to  be  slavery  in  the 
length  and  breadth  of  its  flagitiousness ;  it  is  yet  but  one 
phase  of  its  abounding  villainy.  The  picture  is  startling, 
frightful,  revolting ;  but  it  is  neither  overdrawn,  nor  too 
highly  colored. 

Mr.  S.  replied  to  several  subordinate  points  made,  and  authorities 
cited  by  the  counsel  of  the  defendants,  which  it  is  not  supposed  would 
materially  improve  the  report  of  the  argument.  What  is  further  said 
is  a  part  of  a  report  made  of  what  Mr.  S.  said,  by  Mr.  Otis,  reporter 
of  the  New  York  "Evening  Express,"  and  what  followed  Mr. 
Stewart's  close  is  the  report  of  Mr.  Otis  also. 

Mr.  Stewart  drew  his  remarks  to  a  close  by  appealing  to 
the  court  very  earnestly  as  to  the  high  and  solemn  duty  left 
to  them  to  perform.  It  is  yours,  may  it  please  your  Honors, 
(he  said),  to  put  the  last,  the  finishing  stroke  upon  slavery, 
in  one  of  the  noblest  old  States  of  this  glorious  confederation. 
It  is  an  honor  which  you  should  covet.  Let  no  man  take 
it  from  you.  Leave  it  not  to  other  hands  to  finish  so  noble  a 
work.  What  would  the  world  say,  to  see  a  case  like  this 
argued  as  it  has  been  before  this  court  for  two  days,  with  the 
full  light  ef  this  blessed  and  glorious  Constitution  shedding 
its  rays  upon  it,  turned  off  and  decided  against  liberty,  upon 
the  worse  than  doubtful  authority  of  a  few  extinct  and  ex- 
ploded statutes,  which  stand  repealed  in  your  code  by  the 
voice  of  the  people  speaking  through  a  convention  of  their 
choice — the  acts  of  which  they  have  also  confirmed  by  their 
solemn  votes  ?  May  it  please  your  Honors,  I  cannot  believe 
that  such  will  be  your  decision.  I  have  too  much  faith  in  my 
kind  for  this.  I  feel  that  New  Jersey  will  hold  up  the  hands 
of  this  court  in  coming  to  the  support  of  freedom  and  of  free 
institutions  in  her  borders. 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY.  36T 

Never  can  the  act  be  regretted.  Conscience  will  approve 
it.  Time  will  approve  it.  Death-bed  reflection  will  approve 
it.  Eternity  and  heaven  will  approve  it.  It  has  been  long, 
too  long  postponed.  But  it  is  not  too  late  to  come  up,  man- 
like, statesmanlike,  patriotlike,  godlike,  and  declare  that  it  is 
indeed  true,  in  the  language  of  your  now  organic  law,  that 
within  all  your  pleasant  borders,  at  least,  all  mankind  are,  by 
nature,  entitled  to  perfect  freedom  in  the  possession  of  life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness. 

After  Mr.  Stewart  resumed  his  seat,  there  was  a  pause  of  some 
duration.  The  scene  was  quite  impressive.  The  auditory  was  nu- 
merous and  highly  respectable,  and  such  was  the  impressiveness  with 
which  the  closing  appeal  of  the  advocate  for  freedom  was  delivered, 
that  no  one  seemed  to  like  to  be  the  first  to  break  the  spell  his 
eloquence  had  cast  upon  the  assembly.  At  length,  the  Bench  arose, 
the  Chief  Justice  adjourned  the  court  until  to-morrow  morning,  and 
the  hearing  of  the  causes  which  have  occupied  our  attention  for  these 
two  days  past  was  terminated. 

NOTE. — These  causes  were  subsequently  decided  against  the  con- 
struction advocated  by  Mr.  Stewart,  Chief  Justice  Hornblower 
delivering  a  dissenting  opinion. 


LETTEK   TO    DE.    BAILEY. 

NEW  YORK,  Aug.  80th,  1345. 

DEAR  BAILEY: 

SIR,  as  you  desired  occasionally  to  know  how  I  treated, 
and  was  treated  by,  the  human  beings  who  are  travelling  that 
journey,  whose  limit  is  a  bourne  from  which  no  traveller 
returns  or  sends  back  intelligence  of  the  beauties  and  glories 
of  that  undiscovered  land,  peopled  with  all  the  former  gene- 
rations who  have  made  a  transit  over  this  sorrowing  globe — 
I  hasten,  at  this  point,  to  redeem  my  obligation  to  you,  spring- 
ing from  that  request,  and  give  you  a  brief  account  of  a  recent 
journey,  from  which  I  returned  this  week,  to  the  northern 
part  of  Vermont,  bordering  on  Canada  line,  where  my  four 
sisters  reside.  I  make  an  annual  pilgrimage  to  visit  them. 
Their  husbands,  except  one,  are  thorough  working  liberty 
men. 

I  happened  to  leave  Troy  on  the  morning  the  shilling  boats 
ran  the  seventy  miles  from  Troy  to  Whitehall,  on  lake  Cham- 
plain,  through  the  Northern  Canal.  I  found  myself  on  one 
of  our  very  hot  days,  thermometer  at  89°,  Fahrenheit,  with 
a  hundred  and  twenty  gentlemen  and  ladies,  crowded  into 
one  of  the  narrow  packets.  As  night  approached,  we  learned 
there  would  be  no  berths  for  sleeping,  as  we  were  a  dense 
mass  of  living  flesh,  which  filled  the  boat.  Everything  be- 
tokened a  miserable  and  sweltering  night,  in  which  there  was 
no  calculating  the  limits  of  endurance,  or  the  bounds  of  for- 
bearance necessary  to  bring  us  through  this  purgatorial  state, 
in  which  all  that  was  dissolvable  or  which  might  be  in  solu- 
tion, in  each  man's  composition,  seemed  not  only  to  exude, 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  369 

hut  flow  in  silent  currents  through  the  unnumbered  perspira- 
tory outlets  of  our  different  tabernacles  of  clay.  This  night 
was  to  be  passed  in  head-topping  or  perpendicular  sleep.  It 
was  truly  a  severe  night.  But  to  mitigate  its  horrors,  two 
Methodist  ministers  of  the  northern  part  of  the  New  York 
Conference,  one  about  sixty-five  and  the  other  about  forty- 
five,  were  found  in  the  middle  of  the  boat,  in  the  forepart  of 
the  night,  making  loud  assertions  against  modern  Liberty 
party  Abolitionists,  while  they  justified  slaveholders  and 
southern  institutions.  The  younger  one,  though  a  man  of 
some  talents,  seemed  a  pro-slavery  fanatic,  so  bitter  in  his 
soul  against  Abolitionists,  that,  had  his  power  been  equal  to 
his  malice,  there  would  not  have  been  one  of  us  left  unburied, 
whether  dead  or  alive.  I  first  took  them  for  slaveholders 
peddling  the  peculiar  institutions  of  the  South,  in  small  quanti- 
ties at  the  North,  to  suit  purchasers.  The  first  question  I  put 
to  them,  was,  is  slavery  right,  or  wrong  ?  They  both  replied, 
and  often  asserted,  they  would  not  answer  that  question  ;  that 
had  nothing  to  do  with  the  question ;  but  they  said  the  ques- 
tion was,  what  shall  we  do  with  the  slaves  ?  I  pressed  these 
men  repeatedly  to  answer  my  question,  is  slavery  right,  or 
wrong  ?  But  they  said  they  would  not  answer  me.  I  then 
told  them  if  slavery  was  right,  we  had  nothing  to  do  about 
it,  and  had  no  business  to  intermeddle  with  it ;  and  it  seemed 
to  me  (as  I  by  this  time  discovered  they  were  clergymen  and 
the  whole  boat  was  listening),  that  in  men  at  their  time  of 
life,  as  professed  teachers  of  the  entire  word  of  God,  the  spiri- 
tual fathers  and  teachers  in  the  land,  it  was  a  dereliction  of 
duty  for  them  to  refuse  to  let  us  know  whether  it  was  right 
to  steal  men  and  women  from  Africa,  and  in  chains  bring 
them  to  our  soil,  and  sell  them  like  brutes,  work  them  with- 
out wages,  and  keep  them  on  the  most  wretched  and  scanty 
fare,  and  work  them  in  the  burning  sun  under  the  gashing 
lash,  and,  if  the  master  pleased,  as  he  often  did,  whether  it 
16* 


370  ALVAN   STEWART. 

was  right  for  him  to  sell  children  from  their  parents,  and  a 
wife  from  her  husband,  and  deprive  them  of  the  Bible,  and  all 
the  lights  of  immortality,  except  a  selfish,  ungodly  religion, 
which  was  preached  to  them,  saying:  "Slaves  obey  your 
masters,  God  commands  it,  for  slavery  is  an  institution  of 
God,  and  if  you,  the  slaves,  wish  to  go  to  Heaven,  you  must 
woi'k  as  hard  as  you  can  spring  for  the  master,  and  be  care- 
ful and  never  steal  any  of  your  master's  pigs,  chickens,  corn, 
or  watermelons."  Cannot  you  inform  us,  sirs,  said  I,  whether 
such  an  institution  of  robbery  of  God's  poor  children  is  right 
or  wrong,  or  not ;  or  is  it  too  deep  for  you  to  decide  ?  They 
answered  they  would  not  say,  whether  it  was  right  or  wrong. 
Then  for  the  first  time,  they  had  reason  to  learn  both  the 
wickedness  and  meanness  of  their  position  by  an  overwhelm- 
ing laugh  of  contempt  which  saluted  their  ears,  from  the 
audience.  I  then  stated  that  there  was  not  a  minister  in  the 
entire  South,  who  dared  preach  the  most  important  essential 
truths  of  Christianity  to  the  slave  !  Oh  !  said  they,  the  min- 
isters of  the  South  do  not  preach  politics  to  the  slaves.  That, 
I  replied,  was  the  reason  they  did  not  preach  the  whole  Gos- 
pel. Why,  is  the  Gospel  a  political  gospel,  said  they,  or  one 
of  them  ?  Yes,  said  I,  it  is,  and  I  am  sorry  you  do  not  know 
it.  The  first  great  elementary  political  rights,  are  also  reli- 
gious ones ;  that  a  man  owns  his  own  body  and  soul,  has  a 
right  to  appropriate  and  enjoy  the  faculties  of  that  soul  and 
body,  and  is  bound  to  enlighten  that  mind ;  the  man  has  the 
political  and  religious  right  to  his  wife,  and  the  wife  the  same 
to  her  husband ;  and  these  parents  have  a  political  right  to 
train  up  their  children  in  the  nurture  and  admonition  of  the 
Lord.  Children  obey  your  parents,  is  a  command  of  God  ; 
and  it  is  a  political  right  of  these  parents  to  exact  obedience; 
but  slavery  says,  "  no,  obey  your  masters."  The  right  of 
worshipping  God  according  to  the  dictates  of  your  own  con- 
science is  one  of  the  greatest  of  political  rights— that  alone, 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  371 

enjoyed  by  the  slave,  would  set  him  free,  for  there  is  no  slave 
but  feels  his  right  of  conscience  violated,  in  serving  a  master 
as  a  slave,  by  force.  Finally,  after  a  great  deal  of  Jesuitical 
pettifogging  on  the  subject,  evincing  trick,  and  heartless 
devices  to  delude,  they  said  they  were  opposed  to  slavery, 
in  the  abstract.  On  which,  I  asked  them  if  they  were 
opposed  to  the  toothache  in  the  abstract  ?  (An  overwhelm- 
ing laugh.)  They  were  angry,  and  insinuated  that  this  was 
no  comparison  at  all,  and  that  the  audience  were  not  well- 
bred  !  They  then  said  they  would  preach  Jesus  Christ  and 
Him  crucified  to  the  slave.  To  that  I  replied,  that  is  the 
correct  doctrine,  for  everlasting  justice  was  the  fundamental 
of  Christ's  religion.  The  younger  priest  arose  and  in  a  rage 
said,  there  was  no  such  thing  in  the  Bible — Paul  did  not  say 
so,  Christ  did  not  say  so,  and  that  I  was  wiser  than  Paul  and 
Christ.  The  audience  cried,  shame,  horror,  shame  on  such 
priests  and  such  a  religion,  and  this  priest  went  muttering,  in 
a  passion,  on  deck  to  get  fresh  air.  "  Whatsoever  ye  would 
men^  etc.,  I  supposed  proved  the  justice  of  Christ's  religion. 
Much  was  said  in  two  hours  between  me  and  these  wicked 
apologists  of  slavery — enough  to  make  a  small  book.  But  I 
will  say,  I  never  saw  an  audience  so  rapidly  converted  to 
truth  as  this  audience  was,  by  the  shameful  absurdities  of 
these  ministers,  until  these  two  men  might  fairly  and  candidly 
have  been  said  to  have  renounced  the  great  corner-stone 
truths  of  Christianity,  to  bolster  up  the  abhorred  system  of 
slavery.  Terrible  thought,  that  a  man  should  strip  God  of 
his  glorious  attributes,  in  order  to  make  the  devil  respect- 
able! 

A  little  before  daylight,  we  left  the  packet  and  went  on 
board  the  steamer  Saranac,  at  "Whitehall,  and  at  8,  A.M.,  of  that 
day,  at  breakfast,  while  passing  over  the  military  classic  waters 
of  Champlain,  near  Ticonderoga  rums,  a  conversation  broke 
out  at  the  table  as  to  the  cause  of  the  city  of  Washington 


372  ALVAN   STEWART. 

falling  into  the  hands  of  the  British  in  the  summer  of  1814,  in 
the  late  war,  when  I  replied,  it  was  slavery  which  was  the 
source  of  our  weakness,  disgrace,  and  defeat  on  this  painful 
occasion.  Two  well-dressed  men,  who  turned  out  to  be 
slaveholders,  one  from  Georgia  and  the  other  from  Virginia, 
informed  us  that  no  part  of  our  country  was  better  prepared 
to  resist  an  enemy  than  a  slave  State,  as  slaves  loved  their 
masters  so  well  they  would  fight  bravely  for  them.  I  felt 
obliged  to  deny  that  this  was  the  history  of  the  country,  and 
to  remark  that  our  people,  with  more  men  than  the  British, 
the  President  of  the  United  States,  Mr.  Madison,  the  Secre- 
tary of  War  and  heads  of  departments,  with  several  thou- 
sand of  the  best  marksmen  in  America,  gathered  from  ten 
miles  square  and  the  adjacent  States  of  Maryland  and  Vir- 
ginia, who  met  the  British  Commodore  with  his  liberty 
sailors  at  Bladensburgh — our  men  retreated  over  sandhill 
after  sandhill,  and  the  President  at  their  head,  with  the  best 
opportunity  to  have  met  and  conquered  these  sailors,  but  in- 
stead, they  retreated  to  Washington  City,  and  broke  in  per- 
fect confusion,  each  man  fleeing  to  his  home,  leaving  the 
Capitol  to  be  sacked,  burnt  and  plundered  without  resistance. 
Gen.  Smith  of  Georgetown,  D.  C.,  told  me,  in  1818,  while 
passing  over  this  very  ground  in  a  journey  I  was  taking  to 
Washington  City,  that  he  commanded  a  brigade  in  this  fleeing 
army  of  ours,  and  that  the  secret  of  our  disgraceful  flight 
was,  that  a  story  had  been  circulated  through  the  District 
and  adjacent  counties  of  the  two  States,  that  on  that  day  the 
slaves  were  to  rise  and  assert  their  liberty ;  and  that  each 
man  more  feared  the  enemy  he  had  left  behind  in  the  shape 
of  a  slave,  in  his  own  house  or  plantation,  than  he  did  any- 
thing else.  The  officer  and  soldier  had  their  minds  distracted 
with  the  possibility  of  this  insurrection,  said  Gen.  Smith,  and 
therefore  fled  to  their  homes  before  an  inferior  force,  and  left 
Washington  to  the  mercy  of  its  captors.  In  the  Revolution, 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  373 

South  Carolina,  I  think  in  1777,  sent  a  committee  to  the 
Continental  Congress,  at  Philadelphia,  apologizing  for  not  fur- 
nishing the  quota  of  the  conscription  of  troops  designated  by 
Congress  for  that  State,  for  fear  that  their  slaves  would  arise 
and  assert  their  liberty,  when  they  discovered  the  weakness 
of  the  whites,  after  sending  forward  their  legal  war-contin- 
gent to  the  war  of  Independence.  Where  would  have  been 
our  victory,  the  same  autumn  of  '77,  at  Saratoga,  or  our 
finally  acknowledged  Independence,  if  all  had  been  in  the 
position  of  South  Carolina  ?  Slavery  alone  would  have  made 
the  whites  slaves  of  England  for  the  sake  of  American  whites 
enslaving  the  men  of  Africa.  There  was  a  great  deal  said 
between  us.  For  the  Virginian,  I  drew  a  contrast  between 
the  State  of  New  York  and  Virginia.  In  1790,  Virginia,  with 
one-third  more  territory,  with  the  finest  soil,  and  the  most 
beautiful  climate  on  earth,  had  70,000  inhabitants.  The  State 
of  New  York  300,000  people.  Now  Virginia  130,000  or 
140,000,  and  New  York  2,600,000 — double  the  population — 
and  the  city  of  New  York  could  buy  and  sell  Virginia  alone, 
and  they  might  throw  in  North  Carolina  into  the  bargain  ; 
such  was  the  curse  of  slave-labor,  and  prosperity  of  honored 
free  labor.  I  proposed  to  make  a  slave  of  the  Georgian  on 
the  spot,  as  it  was  probable  I  was  the  strongest,  according  to 
his  own  principles,  and  inquired  for  the  objection,  and  what 
he  had  to  say,  why  I  should  not  make  a  slave  of  him,  on  the 
spot.  He  said  that  would  be  wrong,  as  he  was  a  white  man ; 
but  it  would  be  right  to  enslave  an  African,  although  he  was 
only  a  forty-eighth  part  African  and  the  other  forty-seven  parts 
were  Anglo-Saxon.  The  people  raised  a  shout  at  his  propo- 
sition, which  learnt  him  he  was  on  the  beautiful  free  waters 
of  Champlain  instead  of  the  slave-bound  Savannah. 

Our  cause  in  Vermont  seems  firmly  fixed  in  the  affections 
of  the  true-hearted. 

On  Sunday,  the  24th  of  August,  I  spoke  two  hours  in  the 


374  ALVAN   STEWART. 

middle  of  the  day,  to  a  large  audience  in  the  Biick  Church 
in  Cambridge,  in  that  State — six  or  seven  towns  were  repre- 
sented, and  some  of  the  audience  came  sixteen  miles. 

Vermont  will  do  her  duty.  On  my  return  on  Monday,  I 
came  twenty-seven  miles  by  10  A.M.,  to  Burlington,  and  then 
passed  up  the  lake  to  Whitehall,  where,  at  half  after  5  P.M., 
a  most  respectable  body  of  men  and  women,  between  seventy 
and  eighty,  went  on  board  the  canal  packet,  to  pass  through 
the  Champlain  Canal  to  Troy.  We  were  packed  away  quite 
densely  in  the  boat :  and  after  dark,  the  captain,  to  my  sur- 
prize, came  and  said,  I  heard  your  combat  with  the  Metho- 
dist clergyman,  when  you  went  up,  and  I  wish  you  to  speak 
on  the  subject  of  slavery  in  order  to  pass  the  time.  I  told 
him  I  was  unwell  and  had  been  so  used,  up  with  the  hot 
weather,  that  I  could  not  do  it.  He  asked  me  a  second  time, 
and  I  for  the  same  reason  declined.  We  had  gentlemen  and 
ladies  from  Boston,  New  Bedford,  and  ten  to  twelve  Eng- 
lish gentlemen  from  Montreal,  several,  from  New  York,  and 
various  parts.  Mr.  Randall,  an  old  sea  captain  and  a  gentle- 
man of  wealth  from  New  Bedford,  moved  that  Mr.  Stewart  be 
requested  to  speak,  and  it  appeared  to  be  carried  by  an 
almost  unanimous  aye,  with  the  exception  of  two  male  noes 
and  one  female.  And  these  three  noes  were  two  slaveholders 
from  Virginia,  and  the  woman  a  West  India  Cuban  slave- 
holder. And  to  this  strong  invitation  I  replied,  I  did  not 
feel  able  to  speak,  and  declined.  These  slaveholders  at  this 
point  spoke,  and  said,  as  much,  it  was  well  I  had  declined, 
for  they  had  paid  their  money  on  the  boat,  and  were  not  to 
be  disturbed  with  abolition.  Upon  that,  a  gentleman  moved 
that  all  who  desired  to  hear  Mr.  Stewart  speak,  should  rise  up. 
Every  gentleman  and  lady  in  the  cabin  arose  as  with  a  hasty 
spring,  except  the  three  slaveholders.  Upon  that  I  arose 
and  thanked  the  firm  and  pertinacious  friends  of  the  liberty 
of  speech.  I  stated  I  would  now  speak  as  my  right  had 


LETTER   TO   DR.    BAILEY.  375 

been  denied  by  these  slaveholders.  Upon  that  these  slave- 
holding  men  protested  I  should  not  speak ;  if  I  did,  they 
would  leave  the  boat  and  complain  to  the  company.  I  seated 
myself  for  a  moment,  and  the  audience  took  them  in  hand  ; 
and  such  a  tongue-dressing  as  they  received  from  the  gentle- 
men present,  should  be  a  caution  to  their  successors  in  time 
to  come.  The  friends  of  the  freedom  of  speech  said  to  them, 
do  you  mean  to  padlock  us  as  you  do  your  slaves  ?  If  we 
wish  to  discuss  geography,  politics,  agriculture,  religion, 
slavery,  or  abolition,  are  you  three  beings  to  sit  here  and  tell 
us  seventy  people,  what  we  may  or  may  not  say,  and  when  ? 
You  are  most  wretchedly  mistaken  if  you  expect  to  apply 
your  plantation  discipline  to  this  boat,  and  as  to  your  getting 
out  of  the  boat  in  the  night,  that  you  may  do ;  and  as  to  your 
threatening  that  you  will  tell  the  proprietors  of  the  boat  and 
the  world,  to  injure  this  line,  We  defy  your  impotent  malice 
— there  are  men  on  board  of  this  boat  Avho  believe  in  free 
discussion  of  all  things,  who  could  buy  and  sell  all  the  slave- 
holders who  ever  did,  or  ever  will  pass  over  these  waters. 
Do  you  think,  said  one  of  the  audience,  if  a  boat-load  of 
slaveholders  on  the  Savannah,  Ga.,  River,  wished  to  discuss 
the  inimitable  justice  of  working  men,  women,  and  children 
under  the  lash,  without  wages,  and  it  was  opposed  by  these 
travellers  from  Vermont  or  New  York,  as  a  disagreeable 
question  to  them  to  hear,  would  the  slaveholders  be  silent  ? 
No.  The  probability  is  they  would  commit  murder  by  throw- 
ing the  three  men  overboard  to  drown.  I,  being  seated, 
must  say  I  never  saw  our  principle^  vindicated  more  prac- 
tically in  my  life,  and  those  two  men  and  the  woman  were 
perfectly  demolished. 

The  audience  said,  Mr.  Stewart,  go  on ;  and  as  I  arose  again 
they  gave  three  tremendous  cheers.  I  drew  a  picture  by 
comparison  between  New  York  and  Virginia  and  the  Caro- 
linae,  showed  our  prosperity,  riches  and  glory — the  poverty, 


376  ALVAN    STEWART. 

misery,  smallness  of  population,  ignorance  of  their  people, 
the  whipping  out  labor  without  wages,  the  petit-larceny 
course  of  things,  and  the  vast  districts  of  forsaken  and  slave- 
cursed  land,  where  the  fox  climbs  into  the  window,  and  the 
deer  bounds  in  the  thicket  of  a  second  wilderness,  where, 
seventy  years  ago,  might  have  been  found  the  piratical  hospi- 
tality of  those  who  gave  away  what  they  never  earned.  At 
this  point  the  slaveholders  hissed  me.  Ah,  said  I,  that  hiss 
shows  the  malice  of  the  serpent,  the  intelligence  and  bravery 
of  the  goose.  The  audience  gave  a  most  powerful  cheer  and 
made  all  their  canes  rattle  with  approbation.  Whereupon 
one  of  these  creatures  said,  "  you  (meaning  me)  are  an  ass." 
Ah,  said  I,  a  man  who  is  agitated,  often  will  speak  of  his 
nearest  connections,  and  that  this  fellow  had  better  have  been 
silent  rather  than  to  have  conferred  upon  the  poor  speaker  a 
title  which  had  so  long  been  considered  the  brightest  jewel 
in  the  crown  of  this  slaveholder's  race,  and  that  from  Balaam's 
ass  their  great  ancestor,  who  once  spoke,  to  the  one  you  have 
just  heard,  there  has  been  an  articulate  bray  in  the  family 
when  any  one  wished  to  raise  a  man  who  was  a  slave  above 
the  long-eared  brute. 

There  was  another  mighty  roar  of  three  times  three  from 
the  audience,  which  made  these  fellows  get  up  and  go  upon 
deck,  where  one  of  them  came  and  stamped  with  all  his 
might  directly  over  my  head — upon  this  the  captain  darted 
up  and  silenced  him  at  once.  The  audience  were  greatly  en- 
raged at  this  last  indignity.  I  spoke  till  bed-time  ;  and  when 
I  dismissed  I  never  saw  /in  audience  more  indignant  at  slave- 
holders and  their  institutions,  and  the  conduct  of  these  men 
had  done  infinitely  more  than  I  could,  to  confirm  their  hatred 
of  slavery  and  their  abominable  cruelties  toward  their  fellow- 
men.  This  was  the  topic  of  conversation  until  we  separated. 

You  will  excuse  the  length  of  this  letter,  and  believe  me, 
as  ever,  yours,  etc. 


THE  ACT  OF  1793. 

How  came  an  act  so  sanguinary  to  stain  the  pages  of  our 
Federal  Statute  JSook  f 

By  this  act  every  inch  of  the  free  thirteen  States  is  reduced 
to  the  meanest  debasement.  By  this  act,  Congress  sends  the 
prowling  slaveholder,  armed  with  bowie-knives,  pistols, 
halters,  fetters,  and  bloodhounds  in  full  cry,  through  the 
free  States,  pursuing  the  fugitive  slave.  The  northern  State 
judges,  justices  of  the  peace,  as  well  as  those  of  the  Federal 
Government,  the  State  constables,  sheriffs  and  deputies,  the 
United  States  marshals  and  deputies  in  these  States,  by  the 
authority  of  this  awful  and  ferocious  decree  of  1793,  were 
commanded  to  join  in  the  hue  and  cry  of  the  kidnappers  of 
the  South  and  to  re-kidnap,  bind,  fetter  and  certify  back  to 
the  prison  of  the  hopeless,  the  victims  of  a  nation's  atrocity. 

During  the  summer  of  1787,  six  weeks  were  consumed  by 
the  southern  delegates  at  Philadelphia,  in  that  convention 
which  formed  the  Federal  Constitution,  contending  that  all 
laws  to  regulate  commerce  must  be  enacted  by  two-thirds  of 
the  members  elected  to  the  House  of  Representatives  and 
Senate  of  the  United  States.  The  delegates  from  the  North 
and  East  declared  this  government  one  in  which  a  majority 
must  govern ;  and  utterly  refused  to  place  a  perfect  control 
of  the  government  in  the  hands  of  the  South,  who  had  little 
or  no  commerce  to  regulate.  The  South  then  said  if  they 
surrendered  this  proposition  they  must  have  equivalents. 
And  they  demanded  that  the  Constitution  should  be  so  made 
that  Congress  should  have  no  power  to  interdict  the  old 
African  slave  trade,  from  the  4th  of  March,  1789,  until  the  1st 


378  ALVAN    STEWART. 

of  January  1808  ;  so  that  the  South  might  issue  her  procla- 
mation to  the  four  corners  of  the  globe,  summoning  all  the 
villains,  pirates,  kidnappers  and  man-thieves,  who  wandered 
over  the  face  of  the  earth,  to  come  to  the  great  murder  feast 
of  nineteen  years,  and  plunge  into  the  centre  of  Africa  and  burn 
and  destroy  her  towns,  assault  and  capture  her  men,  women 
and  children,  and  make  her  rivers  desolate  and  leave  her 
lands  without  inhabitants,  and  bring  the  survivors  as  slaves 
to  cultivate  the  plantations  of  the  southern  Democrats. 

To  this  proposition  the  North  consented  and  basely  bowed. 
And  it  was  so.  The  South  then  said,  one  good  turn  deserves 
another,  and  after  we  have  risked  our  lives  in  robbing 
Africa  of  her  people  and  brought  them  to  our  country,  we 
ought,  as  a  basis  of  representation  in  Congress,  to  count  five  of 
these  slaves  the  same  as  three  whites,  and  thus  make  them 
into  a  dumb  constituency.  Agreed,  said  the  East  and  North. 
And  by  virtue  of  this  slave  representation,  twenty-five 
members  now  hold  their  seats  in  the  House  of  Represen- 
tatives. 

Nearly  four  years  rolled  by  after  the  new  Constitution 
went  into  operation,  and  for  four  years  had  Africa  sent  up  to 
Heaven  the  lamentations  of  ruined  and  rifled  nations ;  when 
the  South  made  her  third  experiment  and  found  a  lower 
depth  in  northern  meanness,  than  depravity  herself  had  ever 
sounded,  or  legislative  impudence  ever  fathomed.  The 
South  told  the  North  that  these  ungrateful  sons  and 
daughters  of  Africa,  after  they  had  kindly  brought  them 
from  a  land  of  Paganism  to  a  land  of  Christian  whips  and 
pious  chains,  to  a  land  of  human  back-furrowed  Democracy, 
to  a  land  hi  which  the  Republican  master  has  a  better  right 
to  the  African's  body,  wife  and  children,  than  the  African 
man  has  to  himself  or  to  them,  still,  with  all  these  rights 
secured  to  the  southrons  by  the  Constitution,  these  people  will 
run  to  your  free  States  in  the  North,  and  we  shall  lose  our 


THE   ACT   OF   1793.  379 

trouble  and  money  in  kidnapping  them,  and  bringing  them  over 
the  breadth  of  the  Atlantic,  unless  you  will  kindly,  when  they 
flee  into  your  free  States,  agree  by  law  to  be  our  wolf-dogs, 
and  deny  them  food  and  shelter,  and  run  back  and  howl  on 
their  track  and  re-kidnap  them — we  shall  lose  the  great  object 
we  had  in  forming  the  Union — which  was  to  spread  the  aegis 
of  the  Constitution  over  man-stealing,  piracy  and  blood,  and 
thtus  gain  a  constitutional  respectability  in  this  pursuit,  which 
we  could  not  otherwise  obtain.  We  hope  the  dear  North 
wih1  not  refuse  us  their  aid  ;  otherwise  the  constitutional  pro- 
vision of  nineteen  years  will  be  of  no  use,  and  the  great  capital 
we  have  embarked  in  the  slave  trade  will  be  a  total  loss ;  and 
in  fact  slavery  itself  will  fall  to  the  ground  and  must  be 
abandoned,  unless  the  Christian  North  agree  to  be  our  trusty 
watch-dogs  to  run  fugitives  down  and  take  them  up. 
"  Agreed,"  said  the  North  and  East ;  and  thereupon  in  con- 
junction with  the  South,  passed  the  nefarious  act  of  Con- 
gress of  12th  February,  1793. 

A  half  century  of  crime  has  ah1  but  elapsed,  which  has  no 
parallel,  as  between  independent  States,  in  the  annals  of 
venality  or  the  crookedness  of  perversion.  Forty-nine  years 
rolled  to  eternity's  shore,  bearing  on  their  front  wrongs  done 
by  man  to  man,  not  surpassed  in  outrage,  nor  equalled  in 
refined  malignity,  by  any  invention  of  our  race,  in  which 
the  contest  was  between  the  profoundest  abjectness  of 
subserviency  on  our  side,  and  the  most  sanguinary  avarice 
on  the  other. 

NANCY'S   CASE. 

In  February,  1842,  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  IT.  S.  at 
Washington  considered  this  act,  in  which  the  following  facts 
appeared.  About  sixteen  years  ago,  an  aged  slaveholder, 
in  the  State  of  Maryland,  being  a  man  of  a  kind  heart,  and 


.SOU  ALT  AN    STEWART. 

having  a  colored  woman  possessing  many  virtues,  by  the 
name  of  Nancy,  of  the  age  of  twenty  years,  he  emancipated 
her,  as  he  supposed.  This  slaveholder,  being  careless,  did 
not  give  the  young  woman  her  legal  manumission  papers. 
She  came  about  fifteen  miles  from  the  North  line  of  Mary- 
land into  Pennsylvania ;  where,  by  her  industry  and  good 
conduct,  she,  in  the  course  of  a  year,  recommended  herself 
to  the  affections  of  a  very  respectable  free  colored  man, 
whom  she  married.  This  colored  man  had  a  comfortable 
estate,  which,  with  their  industry,  maintained  them  in  a 
very  respectable  manner.  Years  went  by,  and  in  the  course 
of  time  they  were  the  parents  of  four  fine  children.  The  old 
slaveholder  being  dead,  and  his  son  learning  that  this  woman 
had  not  received  the  legal  manumission  papers  the  law  re- 
required,  and  being  moved  by  the  infernal  avarice  and 
cruelty  of  slavery,  about  three  years  ago  took  two  or  three 
loafers,  and  being  armed  with  pistols  and  bowie-knives,  he 
went  to  a  Pennsylvania  justice  of  the  peace,  living  three  or 
four  miles  from  this  woman,  and  obtained  a  warrant  to  arrest 
her  and  all  of  her  children  and  bring  them  before  the  justice; 
where  the  slaveholder  said  he  would  have  it  tried  to  know 
whether  the  woman  and  children  were  his  or  not. 

The  slaveholder  and  his  myrmidons  pitched  hi  at  an  unsus- 
pected hour,  about  sundown,  upon  this  poor  mother  and 
her  little  brood,  and  instantly  dragged  them  out  of  their 
house ;  the  mother  screaming,  kidnappers !  kidnappers  !  kid- 
nappers !  The  children  burst  forth  in  the  most  terrific  cries, 
which  were  heard  by  their  father  in  the  field,  who  came  run- 
ning to  the  house.  The  wagon  by  this  time,  without  any 
explanation  to  the  distracted  husband  and  father,  having 
started,  the  horses  going  full  jump,  and  the  broken-hearted 
father  following  and  hallooing  to  stop,  until  the  wagon  passed 
out  of  sight  in  the  distance.  The  father  came  to  a  tavern, 
near  the  justice,  where  the  kidnappers  stopped,  and  the  jus- 


THE   ACT  OF  1793.  881 

tice,  being  from  home  that  evening,  the  kidnapper  told  the 
husband  he  would  take  good  care  of  his  wife  and  children 
until  next  morning,  9  A.M.,  when  they  would  go  before  the 
justice,  and  the  cause  should  be  tried.  The  husband,  believ- 
ing what  the  kidnapper  told  him,  and  the  doors  of  his  own 
house  having  been  left  wide  open,  he  concluded,  at  the  re- 
quest of  his  wife,  to  go  back  and  shut  the  doors  and  secure 
things  at  his  plundered  home,  and  come  back  early  the  next 
morning  ;  the  slaveholder  having  solemnly  sworn  he  would 
not  remove  the  family  without  the  justice  decided,  on  hear- 
ing the  case,  he  had  a  right  so  to  do.  But  behold  the  dread- 
ful villainy  of  a  slaveholder  :  at  midnight,  when  the  neighbor- 
hood were  locked  in  sleep,  he  and  his  gang  arose  and  took 
the  woman  and  children,  and  before  daylight,  he  had  driven 
with  such  speed,  that  they  were  secured  in  one  of  the  great 
prison  houses,  to-wit,  the  State  of  Maryland.  At  daylight 
the  broken-hearted  husband  went  to  the  justice,  who  told 
him  that  the  woman  and  children  had  never  been  brought 
before  him ;  and  from  the  statement  of  the  tavern-keeper,  it 
was  obvious  to  the  poor  colored  man  and  his  neighbors,  that 
his  wife  and  children  had  surely  been  kidnapped  without 
trial ;  the  husband  followed  to  the  Maryland  line,  which  he 
did  not  dare  pass  over ;  as  by  a  law  of  Maryland  (though 
contrary  to  the  Constitution  of  the  U.  S.),  a  free  colored 
man  coming  into  Maryland,  might  be  taken  and  sold  into 
perpetual  slavery.  Oh !  the  sorrows  of  this  woman  and  this 
man;  all  of  their  hopes  stranded  for  life;  their  free-born 
children  instantly  turned  to  slaves.  The  neighbors  of  the 
colored  man,  in  Pennsylvania  were  incensed  and  highly  in- 
dignant. There  is  a  law  in  Pennsylvania  punishing  kidnap- 
pers from  three  to  ten  years  in  the  Penitentiary  of  that 
State ;  and  under  that  law,  the  neighbors  of  the  bereaved 
husband,  went  before  the  Grand  Jury  of  a  Court  of  Oyer 
and  Terminer  of  the  State  of  Pennsylvania,  and  got  the 


382  ALVAH   STEWABT. 

Maryland  villains  indicted  for  kidnapping.  Upon  the  indict- 
ment being  presented  to  the  Governor  of  Pennsylvania,  he 
made  a  requisition  upon  the  Governor  of  Maryland,  to 
deliver  up  the  kidnapper  for  trial  to  the  Court  of  Pennsyl- 
vania. The  Governor  of  Maryland  refused  to  obey  the  re- 
quisition or  deliver  up  the  felon. 

A  correspondence  finally  took  place  between  the  govern- 
ors of  the  two  States,  by  which  it  was  agreed  that  their 
respective  States  should  pass  a  legislative  agreement  on 
this  subject,  into  a  law,  which  was  done  accordingly.  The 
substance  of  this  agreement  was,  that  the  cause  against  the 
kidnapper  was  to  be  tried  in  the  Pennsylvania  Court  of  Oyer 
and  Terminer,  and  if  this  court  decided  against  the  kidnap- 
per, the  cause  was  to  be  taken  by  writ  of  error  to  the 
Supreme  court  of  Pennsylvania ;  and  if  this  court  affirmed 
the  judgment  against  the  kidnapper,  it  was  then  by  a  writ  of 
error  to  be  taken  before  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States  for  an  ultimate  decision. 

The  Pennsylvania  Courts  decided  against  the  kidnapper 
and  in  favor  of  their  own  statute,  and  sentenced  the  culprit, 
I  believe,  to  seven  years  in  the  State  Prison.  According  to 
the  agreement,  the  cause  was  brought  by  writ  of  error 
before  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States,  at  Washing- 
ton, in  the  winter  of  1842;  where  the  most  remarkable  deci- 
sion was  made,  by  this  Court,  after  hearing  the  respective 
Attorney  Generals  of  the  States  aforesaid. 

I  say  remarkable,  for  nothing  in  the  19th  century  had 
transcended  the  decisions  of  the  17th,  by  Jeffreys,  Scroggs 
and  Pollefexen  in  the  bloody  trials  of  Lord  Russell  and 
Algernon  Sidney,  until  this  master  and  terrific  decision  of 
judicial  tyranny  flung  all  the  judicial  Neros  of  England  into 
the  regions  of  forlorn  and  retumless  insignificance.  The 
court  decided  that  the  State  decisions  of  Pennsylvania  were 
wrong,  and  annulled  them.  It  further  decided  that  the  part 


THE   ACT   OF    1793.  383 

of  the  Act  of  Congress  of  1793,  which  required  State  judges 
and  justices  of  the  peace  to  issue  warrants,  at  the  instance 
of  slaveholders  or  their  agents,  against  fugitive  slaves,  and 
hear  the  cause  and  grant  certificates  of  ownership  to  the 
claimant  of  a  fugitive,  was  unconstitutional,  null  and  void ; 
as  Congress,  the  court  said,  had  no  right  to  require  State 
officers  to  execute  an  Act  of  Congress,  or  of  the  Federal 
Government. 

I  would  remark  here  that  every  fugitive  slave,  who  has 
been  sent  back  to  slavery,  for  49  years,  by  a  State  judge, 
State  justice  of  the  peace,  recorder  or  mayor,  has  been 
judicially  kidnapped,  and  is  now  held  in  slavery  by  force  of 
an  unconstitutional  decision.  Dreadful  thought,  that  the 
thirteen  free  States  have  been  obeying  an  unconstitutional 
law,  and  committing  the  crime  of  judicial  kidnapping,  as 
though  the  fate  of  the  slave  was  not  hard  enough ;  it  seems 
that  every  State  judge,  justice,  mayor  or  recorder,  who  have 
done  this  shocking,  bloody  and  dirty  work,  had  no  business, 
by  law,  to  do  it ;  and  that  any  man  would  have  been  justi- 
fied in  going  into  their  unlawful  and  unconstitutional  court, 
it  having  no  jurisdiction  of  the  fugitive,  and  taken  him 
away  from  the  State  functionary  by  force,  and  the  State 
judicial  officer  could  not  protect  himself  or  the  court ;  and 
the  individual  who  had  set  all  such  fugitive-State-judicial 
functionaries  at  defiance,  would  have  been  upheld  by  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States. — Oh !  the  poor  slave, 
what  hast  thou  not  suffered  ? 

The  court  decided,  however,  that  a  judge  of  the  United 
States  courts  might  issue  a  warrant,  under  the  Act  of  1793, 
and  arrest  a  fugitive  slave,  at  the  instance  of  a  claimant,  and 
hear  the  proofs  and  grant  the  master  or  his  agent  a  certificate, 
returning  the  fugitive  into  captivity.  There  are  only  three 
such  officers  in  the  State  of  New  York,  to  wit,  Judge  Conklin 
of  Auburn,  Judge  Betts  of  the  city  of  New  York,  both 


384:  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

district  judges  of  the  United  States,  and  Judge  Smith 
Thompson,  one  of  the  justices  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States.  The  court  further  decided,  which  is  the 
truly  fearful  and  alarming  portion  of  their  decision,  that  the 
slaveholder,  or  his  agent,  may,  whenever  and  wherever  he 
sees  fit,  arrest  a  fugitive  slave  without  warrant  or  any 
authority  from  a  State  or  United  States  judge  or  justice,  or 
any  functionaiy  on  the  earth,  and  take  the  said  fugitive  into 
the  service  of  the  slaveholder ;  and  no  State  law,  writ  of 
habeas  corpus,  right  of  trial  by  jury,  or  any  State  law 
intended  to  designate  a  mode  of  trial  for  the  fugitive,  shall 
stand  in  the  way  of  the  master  :  or  in  other  words,  the  mas- 
ter may  seize  any  person  he  sees  fit,  in  the  State  of  New 
York,  to  call  his  slave ;  or  the  master  may  walk  triumphantly 
over  all  State  laws  enacted  for  the  defence  of  human  liberty, 
and  carry  off"  his  prey  to  his  den.  According  to  this  dread- 
ful decision,  any  man  in  the  State  of  New  York,  who  assumes 
that  he  is  a  slaveholder,  may  lay  his  hands  on  any  other  man 
or  woman  in  the  State,  claiming  him  or  her  by  word  of 
mouth,  as  his  or  her  slave,  who  has  escaped  from  him  in  some 
slave  State ;  and  although  the  person  claimed  may  cry  and 
protest,  that  he  or  she  was  born  free  and  white,  and  was 
never  out  of  this  State ;  still  no  trial,  no  proceeding  whatso- 
ever, can  be  put  in  operation  to  investigate  the  identity  of 
the  person  claimed,  or  look  into  the  matter,  or  stay  the  potent 
slaveholder,  but  the  victim  must  go  to  a  slave  State  as  a 
slave,  even  if  it  was  the  son  of  the  governor  of  this  State,  or 
the  governor  himself;  and  the  court  insultingly  tells  us  the  only 
remedy  of  this  kidnapped  person,  is  to  be  found  after  he  or 
she  has  reached  the  master's  home,  in  a  slave  State,  to  sue,  in 
a  civil  action,  the  master,  in  a  slave  court,  for  his  liberty. 
Ah !  glorious  opportunity,  to  go  to  a  southern  lawyer  penni- 
less, the  master  having  taken  your  money,  the  master  holding 
a  pistol  to  your  breast,  forbidding  your  leaving  the  planta- 


THE   ACT   OF   1793.  385 

tion ;  and  if  you  do,  he  may  legally  shoot  you  dead,  if  you 
•will  not  stop  when  bidden ;  you  are  1,000  miles  from  all  of 
your  witnesses,  and  now  the  poorest  man  in  the  creation  of 
God — a  slave  ;  and  then  you  are  told  to  litigate  with  your 
master  in  a  slave  State,  before  slave  judges  and  a  slavehold- 
ing  jury  ! 

Why  not  stop  and  have  the  litigation  with  the  master  in 
this  State,  where  he  first  sets  up  his  claim,  by  which  the 
burden  of  proving  you  his  slave  will  be  thrown  on  him,  and 
you  will  have  judges  and  jurors  who  are  not  slaveholders, 
and  also  your  witnesses  to  prove  your  freedom,  and  friends 
and  means  to  employ  counsel  ?  The  answer  to  this  seems  to 
be,  the  great,  lordly,  sovereign  slaveholder  must  not  be 
hindered  by  your  State  court  trials — his  business  is  too 
important  for  him  to  be  delayed  from  home  to  litigate  the 
freedom  of  a  man  or  woman.  The  slaveholder  has  said  that 
A.  is  his  slave  and  that  is  enough,  and  ought  and  must  satisfy 
those  fastidious  fools  at  the  North ;  his  word  and  character 
is  like  the  chevalier  Bayard's — above  fear  and  without 
reproach.  Again,  if  the  slave  sues  in  a  slave  State  for  his 
freedom,  the  slave  will  have  the  burden  of  proof  thrown  on 
him — of  proving  a  negative — that  he  is  not  a  slave. 

If  he  has  any  colored  blood  in  his  veins,  the  law  comes  to 
the  master's  aid,  with  the  presumption  that  he  is  a  slave ;  and 
further,  if  ever  so  white,  and  he  is  doing  work  as  a  slave — 
then  if  he  sues  for  freedom,  the  cruel  and  malignant  law  of 
the  South  presumes  he  is  a  slave,  or  he  would  not  be  in  the 
condition  of  the  slave.  Now  this  rule  of  presumption  is  in 
exact  hostility  to  the  common  law,  that  great  inheritance  of 
English  liberty  from  our  Saxon  ancestors.  By  the  common 
law  all  men  are  presumed  honest,  just,  and  free,  until  the  con- 
trary appears  by  proof. 

It  was  said  when  this  decision  was  announced  it  produced 
a  shock,  as  though  a  mine  had  exploded  under  the  capitol. 
17 


386  ALVAN   STEWART. 

There  are  nine  judges  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States  ;  five  of  whom  are  slaveholders.  It  is  said  six  opinions 
were  written  at  the  time,  in  which  a  great  variety  of  judg- 
ment prevailed. 

It  is  said  by  Judge  Baldwin,  that  the  Constitution  executed 
itself,  and  that  no  such  act  as  1793  was  needed,  and  the  act 
was  void.  But  an  average  of  opinion  seemed  to  conduct  the 
court  to  the  conclusions  above  referred  to.  If  we  are  to 
consider  that  astounding  branch  of  the  decision  as  law,  by 
which  the  slaveholder  comes  to  the  North  and  exercises  the 
slaveholder's  elementary  power,  not  right,  the  same  as  hi 
the  woods  of  Africa-  during  the  time  of  the  slave  trade  ;  then 
it  would  seem  that  while  we  have  declared  it  piracy  and 
death  to  take  a  man  with  a  view  to  enslave  him,  on  the  coast 
of  Africa  ;  that  at  the  same  time  one  man  may  take  another 
and  make  a  slave  of  him,  in  Oneida  County,  be  he  white  or 
black,  and  take  him  to  a  slave  State  and  there  use  him  as  a 
slave  ;  and  that  the  only  remedy  for  this  kidnapping  is  a  civil 
suit,  prosecuted  by  the  helpless  slave  against  his  master, 
before  a  slave  court  and  jury.  This  would  not  give  one  in 
ten  thousand  an  opportunity  to  escape.  For  it  must  be 
remembered  that  Pennsylvania  and  the  free  States,  and  ours 
amongst  the  rest,  have  passed  laws  against  kidnapping,  by 
which  these  statutes  have  said  that  whoever  shall  take  and 
violently  carry  away  any  person  from  this  State,  or  sell  said 
person  with  a  view  to  enslave  him,  without  lawful  authority, 
shall  be  imprisoned,  varying  from  three  to  ten  years,  and,  I 
believe,  in  some,  for  life. 

But  this  decision  overthrows  those  most  important  laws, 
enacted  for  the  feeble  and  defenceless,  as  the  great  bulwarks 
of  human  liberty,  and  turns  the  free  or  slave  States  into  slave- 
kidnapping  ground  ;  where  a  man  may  commit  the  crime  of 
enslaving,  in  perfect  safety  ;  and  his  only  danger  is  that  the 
slave  may  sue  for  his  liberty  in  a  slave  State,  though  that  he 


THE   ACT   OF   1793.  387 

cannot  do  without  the  master's  permission,  as  he  cannot  leave 
the  master's  premises  without  his  consent,  and  that  will  never 
be  given  to  go  and  consult  lawyers  to  invalidate  the  master's 
title.  And  if  the  slave  attempts  to  leave  the  master's  pre- 
mises by  force,  the  master  can  shoot  him  dead  if  it  be  necessary 
to  enforce  obedience  or  restrain  him.  If  the  nation,  or  the 
free  States  dreamed  for  a  moment  of  the  horrible  position  in 
which  they  were  placed,  by  the  late  decision  of  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States,  under  the  act  of  1793,  there  would 
be  one  universal  mustering  of  all  men,  women  and  children 
ibr  the  repeal  of  the  act  of  1793  ;  and  also  for  a  declaratory 
act  by  Congress,  abolishing,  if  in  its  power,  the  legal  effect 
of  this  monstrous  opinion  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States. 

To  this  frightful  precipice  has  slavery  conducted  this  nation, 
at  last,  so  that  now  no  man  has  any  shelter  left  beneath  the 
magna  charta  of  American  Independence,  for  his  own  liberty, 
his  wife's,  or  his  child's,  for  a  single  day ;  for  he  may  be 
made  a  slave  in  Oneida  County,  in  the  State  of  New  York, 
any  moment,  and  cannot  appeal  to  any  law  in  this  State  to 
prevent  it.  No,  the  writ  of  habeas  corpus,  the  right  of  trial  by 
jury,  are  all  swept  by  the  board,  and  a  man  now  holds  his 
liberties  by  no  better  tenure  than  a  kidnapper's  mercy. 

Good  God,  have  mercy  on  us  and  destroy  slavery,  for  it  is 
destroying  life,  liberty,  property,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness. 
I  hope  our  friends  will  in  the  next  two  years,  present  the 
petitions  to  abolish  the  act  of  1793  for  signatures,  to  every 
householder,  his  wife,  and  children  over  fourteen  years  of 
age  throughout  the  Empire  State ;  going  two  and  two  from 
house  to  house,  pleading  for  a  deliverance  of  this  Republic. 

Abolish  the  act  of  1793  and  we  place  Canada  on  Mason 
and  Dixon's  line  ;  or,  in  other  words,  we  set  Canada  down 
on  the  line  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky,  and  Missouri, 
and  slavery  would  abolish  itself  in  those  four  great  States  in 


388  ALVAN   STEWART. 

three  years.  The  slaves  would  have  nothing  to  do  but  walk 
over  the  line. 

The  abolition  of  the  act  of  1793  delivers  the  North  from 
the  basest  position  ever  occupied  by  States  or  individuals.  It 
gives  us  back  our  bibles  and  the  riches  of  immortality,  which 
the  act  of  1793  makes  us  agree  to  forego  and  renounce. 
Now,  we  abjure  the  doctrines  of  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God, 
breathing  mercy  and  love  to  all,  to  become  the  allies  of  the 
cruel,  and  the  stirrup-holders  of  kidnappers,  and  the  collar- 
wearers  of  the  southern  slaveholders. 

*d  January,  1843.  '    • 


EXTRACTS  FROM 

KEPLY  TO  THE  JULIUS  TEACT 

OF  THE  REV.   CALVIN  COLTON,   1843. 

WE  cannot  forbear  asking  Mr.  Colton,  cannot  Congress, 
who  made  this  law  in  1793,  repeal  it  in  1843  ?  There  canilot 
be  two  opinions  on  this  subject,  among  learned  or  unlearned, 
Christians  or  Jews,  slaveholders  or  Liberty  party  men.  If 
Congress  may  repeal  this  law,  the  Act  of  12th  of  February, 
1793,  which  it  has  passed,  what  would  be  the  position  of  the 
slave  ?  Precisely  the  same  as  though  Canada  was  to  slide 
down  and  be  bounded  on  the  South  by  Mason  and  Dixon's 
line — precisely  the  same  as  though  Canada  was  the  northern 
boundary  line  of  the  slave  States.  The  moment  the  slaves 
passed  into  Pennsylvania,  Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois  or  Iowa, 
from  a  slave  State,  they  would  be  free,  by  the  laws  of  slavery, 
and  the  law  of  nations.  They  could  not  be  pursued  or  ar- 
rested. They  would  be  free.  How  long  would  slavery  stand 
in  the  border  States  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky,  or 
Missouri  ?  Not  five  years,  if  we  take  away  the  power  of 
reclamation.  This  act  of  Congress  in  abridging  the  natural 
right  of  the  slave  to  seek  bis  liberty,  is  the  act  of  the  free 
States  in  common  with  the  slave.  But  for  this  law,  slavery 
would  have  been  overthrown.  But  for  the  North  agreeing 
to  stand  as  a  bull-dog  sentry  on  the  line  between  freedom  and 
slavery,  covenanting  to  re-kidnap  the  fleeing,  innocent  man 
and  woman,  and  restore  him  or  her  in  chains  to  his  oppressor 
slavery  would  have  fallen  to  the  ground,  by  the  power  of 
flight  alone. 


390  ALVAN   STEWART. 


BALLOT-BOX    POTTER. 

According  to  slaveholders,  their  exponents  and  apologists, 
every  right  they  have  acquired  over  the  slaves  by  the  laws, 
constitutions  and  compacts,  are  ballot-box  powers,  in  their 
inception,  and  have  all  been  voted  for  in  the  appointment  or 
election  of  those  individuals  who  created,  made  or  passed 
these  laws,  constitutions  or  compacts.  But  slavery,  though 
the  highest  of  crimes,  is  a  thing  so  much  more  sacred  than 
any  other  human  right,  that  when  once  voted  into  existence 
by  ballot-box  power,  or  if  ballot-box  intrenchments  are 
thrown  up  around  it,  the  ballot-box  has  spent  its  power,  un- 
less it  be  to  fortify  the  infernal  institution,  but  has  no  power 
to  overthrow,  curb  or  restrain  it ;  when  the  ballot-box  has 
once  conferred  any  power  on  this  piratical  institution,  it  must 
remain  inviolable,  irrepealable,  to-day,  to-morrow,  and  for- 
ever ! !  So  say  slaveholders,  and  Mr.  Colton  and  the  Whigs, 
in  the  spirit  of  their  arguments,  in  favor  of  what  we  might 
suppose  were  truly  peculiar  institutions,  which,  when  once 
made,  defy  their  creator,  and  become  eternal.  Yes,  they  are 
peculiar,  if  having  once  got  into  existence,  there  is  no  way  to 
get  them  out.  But  Mr.  Colton  has  been  so  kind  as  to  inform 
us  how  to  get  them  out.  It  is  by  moral  suasion.  These 
institutions  which  will  not  yield  to  the  omnipotence  of  the 
ballot-box,  may  still  be  kindly  flattered  out  of  existence ! 
Yes,  they  may  be  persuaded  to  die,  but  cannot  be  killed. 
The  institution  being  so  very  humane  and  generous,  it  is  to 
be  presumed,  that,  to  help  justice  and  humanity,  it  will  agree 
to  die,  from  pure  patriotism,  and  from  an  abhorrence  of  its 
own  existence.  But  the  difficulty  still  is,  if  Mr.  Colton  is 
right,  that  slavery  cannot  die,  except  through  the  ballot-box 
power ;  for  if  you  should  persuade  each  slaveholder  to  give 
liberty  to  his  slaves,  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  unless  sla- 
very is  forbidden  by  law,  what  hinders  another  villain  from 


EXTRACTS  FROM  REPLY  TO  THE  JUNIUS  TRACT.    391 

setting  up  the  business  again,  under  the  nose  of  Congress  ? 
But  what  is  the  use  in  pressing  this  argument  further,  or  of 
sending  an  absurdity  in  hot  pursuit  after  an  impossibility ! 

THE   GREAT  VOLCANO. 

Look  at  the  absurdity  of  this  reverend  and  crafty  Whig. 
We  are  told  over  and  over  and  over  again,  from  page  to  page 
of  his  argument,  that  our  mission  of  benevolence  might  be 
very  proper,  if  we  did  not  propose  to  overthrow  the  general 
welfare,  and  trample  on  contracts,  compacts  and  moral  obli- 
gations, by  casting  our  votes  where  we  have  not  the  least 
chance  of  success,  and  if  we  were  successful  hi  getting  a 
majority,  we  are,  in  all  respects,  perfectly  powerless,  as  we 
have  not  a  crumb  of  constitutional  power  by  which  to  touch 
slavery,  or  even  the  hem  of  its  garment,  in  state  or  nation,  it 
is  so  sacredly  guarded  against  every  approach  of  humanity  ; 
btit  still,  by  voting  for  these  abolition  objects,  we  defeat  our- 
selves and  the  Whigs,  and  thus  we  may  "  throw  the  govern- 
ment of  the  States  and  nation  into  hands  that  will  ruin  us  all, 
as  they  have  heretofore  tried  to  do,  with  no  small  success." 
What  are  we  to  gain  by  acting  with  Whigs,  after  the  gentle- 
man has  shown  us  that  the  Whigs  cannot  touch  slavery  even 
with  a  pair  of  tongs,  for  want  of  constitutional  power ;  and 
that  all  the  Whigs  can  do,  with  that  great  slaveholder  as 
President  (who  swaUows  daily  the  unpaid  labor  of  52  human 
beings),  would  be  to  prop,  enlarge,  fortify  and  strengthen 
slavery  ?  Let  him  not  talk  of  the  right  of  petition — when 
did  Clay,  or  Calhoun,  or  Van  Buren  ever  come  out  iu  its 
favor  ?  And  if  the  Whig  party  had  power,  and  allowed  us 
to  discuss  every  proposition,  for  curtailing  and  lopping  off  a 
branch  or  a  twig  of  slavery,  still  this  great  constitutional 
Whig  informs  us  (and  the  Whigs  have  adopted  his  legal 
advice  by  circulating  his  tract  as  their  opinion)  that  however 
full  of  emancipation,  justice  and  mercy,  a  Whig  Congress 


392  ALYAN   STEWAET. 

might  be,  it  could  contrive  no  way  or  means  to  deliver  or 
aid  a  single  slave,  -without  tearing  the  Constitution  all  to 
shreds  and  shivers,  involving  the  country  in  flames  and  blood, 
from  Montpelier  to  Tallahassee,  from  the  Pedee  to  the  Sabine, 
from  the  Montauk  to  the  mountains  of  rock,  where  there 
would  be  nothing  to  extinguish  the  flames  of  our  dwellings, 
but  the  blood  of  our  citizens ;  and  this  universal  massacre, 
would  end  in  the  extinction  of  black  and  white,  bond  and  free, 
and  convert  this  end  of  the  continent  into  one  vast  sepulchre 
where  no  living  man  would  survive  to  record  the  dismal  catas- 
trophe, which  had  blotted  a  great  empire  from  the  map  of 
the  world,  in  defending  the  constitutionality  of  slavery ! 
Alas,  alas,  alas,  did  ever  nation  live  on  the  top  of  such  a  con- 
stitutional volcano  before  ?  Yes,  a  volcano  that  never  casts 
up  its  lurid  flames  and  pumice  stones,  as  long  as  you  feed  it 
with  constitutional  gags,  and  the  twenty  slave-elected  mem- 
bers of  Congress  ;  also  by  throwing  down  into  its  voracious 
crater  throat  seven  new  slave  States  and  Florida,  as  a  mere 
desert  to  be  swallowed  by  its  unappeasable  voraciousness, 
with  an  eight  years  war  for  the  extinction  of  the  noble  Semi- 
noles,  at  an  expense  of  fifty  millions  ;  she  can  contain  within 
her  mighty  bowels,  unpained,  the  ten  miles  square,  and  8,000 
slaves  and  three  slave  dungeons  ;  she  can  circulate  the  slaves 
in  coffled  gangs,  or  by  ship,  all  through  her  huge  entrails ; 
she  can  hear  within  her  the  crying  and  groaning  of  the 
whipped  millions,  the  mangled  thousands  and  murdered  hun- 
dreds, as  they  send  up  their  daily  cry  to  a  nation's  mercy, 
unmoved,  untouched ;  but  let  one  petition  for  mercy  or 
deliverance  be  presented,  and  then,  oh  !  the  tremendous  up- 
heavings,  the  unearthly  sounds,  the  smoke,  the  pumice 
stones  and  ashes,  which  put  out  the  sun  of  Liberty,  and  make 
it  dark  at  noon,  while  the  streams  of  boiling,  bubbling,  fiery 
lava  pour  down,  sweeping  all  before  them.  And  it  seems  to 
have  been  the  business  of  Whigs  and  Democrats,  with  the 


EXTRACTS  FROM  REPLY  TO  THE  JUNIUS  TRACT.    393 

great  ecclesiastical  denominations  of  this  country,  to  cap  the 
top  of  this  mighty  slaveholding  volcano,  that  the  prisoners' 
cries  bound  in  its  caverns,  and  the  rage  consequent  on  a 
demand  for  their  deliverance,  might  both  be  suppressed  in 
eternal  silence. 


SLAVERY   EIGHT,    BECAUSE   OF   DISTRESS    IN 

Then,  again,  this  Whig  mouthpiece  says  there  is  distress 
in  England  among  the  operatives. 

Yes,  that  is  true  —  there  is  slavery  in  Brazil,  and  in  Cuba, 
there  is  a  vast  amount  of  highway  robbery  in  Spain,  but 
Spain  does  not  make  highway  robbery  an  organic  institution  : 
and  there  is  the  burning  of  widows  in  the  East  Indies,  or  has 
been  till  of  late,  and  females  have  ruined  and  cramped  feet  in 
China,  and  they  murder,  sometimes,  innocent  people  in 
Cochin  China,  and  they  flog  and  work  people  for  nothing 
in  two  State  Prisons  in  this  State,  and  men  spend  their  lives 
in  the  mines  of  Mexico,  Chili  and  Peru,  and  some  men  whip 
their  wives  in  New  York,  some  men  are  daily  drunk  and 
miserable,  but  women-whipping  and  drunkenness  are  not 
defended  institutions.  What  do  all  these  things  prove? 
Why,  according  to  this  logician,  that  every  abuse  of  man, 
which  we  can  find  existing  on  the  earth,  or  crime  committed 
against  his  happiness,  that  to  be  sure  is  an  example,  which 
authorizes  us  to  adopt  that  abuse,  and  to  put  it  into  our  Con- 
stitution and  make  laws  for  its  defence,  as  an  institution  ; 
and  if  the  institution  be  attacked  for  its  inherent,  self-evident 
villainy,  why,  then  show  that  it  is  right  ?  Oh,  no,  show  that 
some  other  people,  ancient  or  modern,  or  individuals  of  this 
or  that  nation,  have  committed  some  vile  offence  against  God 
and  man,  and  that  proves  slavery  a  good  institution.  The 
abuses  of  the  poor  operatives  in  England  are  not  a  part 
of  the  English  Constitution  and  laws,  compelling  them  to 
suffer. 

n* 


394:  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 


COLTON'S    ARGUMENT PARENT   AND    CHILD. 

But  Mr.  Colton  has  overthrown  slavery  after  all ;  for  he 
says  it  is  like  the  relations  of  husband  and  -wife,  parent  and 
child,  master  and  apprentice.  He  says  the  husband,  parent 
and  master  have  a  right  to  the  service  of  the  wife,  the  child, 
and  apprentice,  and  so  he  says  has  the  master  to  the  slave's 
service,  but  not  to  his  body.  He  says  the  slave  is  entitled  to 
his  own  body,  if  we  understand  him.  He,  speaking  of  the 
slave,  says,  "  the  service,  not  the  person,  is  the  property." 
This  is  new  slave  law,  of  Mr.  Colton' s — it  is  on  the  8th  page 
of  his  tract,  in  which  this  discovery  is  made.  He  says  the 
law  gives  command  of  the  slave's  person,  so  that  the  master 
may  get  his  services.  But  he  says,  "neither  master,  nor 
father,  nor  society  itself  has  property  in  the  persons  of  men, 
but  God  only."  If  a  man  owns  his  body,  how  can  another 
man  get  a  title  to  his  services,  except  by  contract  ?  and  if  any 
man  can  show  a  slave  who  has  made  a  contract  for  a  good 
consideration,  for  himself  and  his  posterity,  to  work  for 
nothing  but  the  chance  of  being  whipped,  beaten,  kicked, 
cuffed,  and  if  he  attempts  to  go  away,  who  then  agrees,  that 
the  master  may  shoot  him,  and  further  agrees  the  master 
may  sell  his  wife  and  children,  and  further  agrees  the  master 
may  pound  him  to  death,  if  he  does  not  work,  and  moreover 
agrees  the  master  may  sell  him  from  his  wife  and  children,  and 
agrees  that  the  master  shall  withhold  all  knowledge,  and  that 
he,  the  slave,  shall  never  own  anything  on  earth — no,  not  a 
cow,  a  sheep,  a  hog  or  a  goat,  and  that  he  contracted  to 
stand  forever,  called  a  chattel,  a  thing,  instead  of  a  man — if 
he  will  show  me  one  such  case  as  this,  I  will  agree  that  this 
man  may  be  a  slave,  and  his  master  a  knave,  and  I  will  not 
try  to  change  their  condition. 

The  husband  and  wife  make  a  contract  in  marriage,  which 
is  reciprocal  and  for  the  mutual  benefit  of  the  parties,  but  the 


EXTRACTS  FROM  REPLY  TO  THE  JUNIUS  TRACT.    395 

husband  cannot  sell  his  wife,  nor  the  wife  her  husband.  The 
indented  apprentice  has  a  consideration  for  his  services  in 
being  taught  a  trade,  receiving  a  good  common  school  educa- 
tion, and  being  clothed  during  his  childish  years.  He  receives 
the  amplest  compensation  for  every  particle  of  labor  he 
performs.  Can  his  master  sell  him  ?  N"o.  Can  his  master 
beat  him  to  death  under  the  head  of  correction  and  go  un- 
punished ?  If  the  master  is  cruel,  his  articles  of  indenture 
can  be  cancelled,  by  the  magistrates  ;  but  what  power,  but 
death,  cancels  the  slave's,  even  if  he  be  seventy  years  of  age. 
Who  ever  heard  of  binding  out  a  boy  or  girl  for  life  ?  Until 
such  cases  occur,  let  no  comparison  be  drawn,  where  there  is 
no  more  resemblance  than  between  an  iceberg  and  a  steam- 
boat. Mr.  Colton  and  the  Whig  party,  think  the  relation  of 
parent  and  child,  and  master  and  slave  are  alike,  and  the 
relation  substantially  of  the  same  interesting  character ;  and 
slavery  appears  so  amiable,  that  Mr.  Colton  and  the  Whig 
party  could  not  find  a  more  pertinent  case  of  resemblance 
and  illustration,  than  the  holy  relation  of  parent  and  child. 
There  are  between  300,000  and  400,000  slaves  in  the  United 
States,  whose  fathers  are  their  masters.  Here  the  double 
relation  of  master  and  parent  on  the  one  side,  and  child  and 
slave  on  the  other,  one  would  suppose,  from  Mr.  Colton's 
and  the  Whig  party's  notions,  on  such  subjects,  must  be  a 
state  of  too  much  advantage  and  happiness  for  the  son-slave 
or  daughter-slave,  to  last  or  enjoy  on  this  earth — a  greater 
share  in  the  good  of  this  world,  than  falls  to  the  ordinary  lot 
of  mortals.  The  parent  and  master,  according  to  Mr.  Colton, 
will  act  for  the  best  and  do  the  best  for  his  child;  and 
as  evidence  of  his  kindness,  he  considers  him  or  her  a  slave, 
and  frequently  sells  his  own  peculiar  picture,  as  early  as  a 
purchaser  presents,  to  preserve  the  affection  of  his  wife,  who 
is  not  delighted  in  seeing  living  images  of  her  husband, 
proving  that  she,  the  wife,  is  but  the  successor  of  some  ser- 


396  ALVAN    STEWAKT. 

vile  Libyan  dame,  in  the  warmer  affection  of  her  husband. 
A  father  cannot  sell  his  legitimate  children,  which,  perhaps, 
Mr.  Colton  may  consider  a  disadvantage,  under  which  the 
bastard-slave  does  not  labor ;  for  the  father  of  the  bastard- 
slave  often  sells  him  or  her,  and  with  the  money  gives  the 
son  of  the  free  woman  a  liberal  education  at  some  eastern 
college,  while  the  son  of  the  same  father,  his  half-brother, 
instead  of  graduating  at  Yale  or  Princeton,  will  receive  his 
honors  at  a  cart-tail,  where  the  parchment  will  be  laid  on  his 
naked  back ;  where,  if  he  is  not  made  master  of  arts,  he  is 
sometimes  permitted  to  graduate  from  time  into  eternity. 
Perhaps  Mr.  Colton  thinks  it  a  misfortune  that  parental  au- 
thority ceases  at  twenty-one  years  of  age,  over  the  child.  The 
law  of  slavery  is  so  kind  as  never  to  give  up  the  master's 
solicitude  for  the  slave,  even  if  he  should  live  100  years. 
This  goes  to  prove,  notwithstanding  some  trifling  disadvan- 
tages on  the  part  of  the  slave,  how  much  more  regard  the 
master  has  than  the  parent — the  latter  throws  up  his  care 
and  responsibility  at  twenty-one,  while  the  kind  master  pur- 
sues the  slave  through  all  the  narrow  lanes  of  life,  with  a 
master's  eye,  nor  once  loses  sight  of  the  object  of  his  tender 
solicitude,  until  the  slave  exchanges  the  master's  kindly  grasp 
for  the  still  more  kindly  gripe  of  death. 

The  son  at  the  death  of  his  father,  whether  twenty-one, 
under  or  over,  inherits  his  father's  property— the  slave  is 
inherited— the  only  difference  is  between  the  active  and  the 
passive  voice,  the  difference  is  a  mere  question  of  parsing 
grammar.  The  son  inherits  the  slave.  The  slave  is  inherited 
by  the  son.  But,  according  to  the  doctrine  of  consideration 
and  reciprocity,  Mr.  Colton  and  the  Whig  party  would  tell 
us  the  bargain  was  equal,  for  if  the  young  master  has  in- 
herited an  aged  slave,  what  then  makes  it  equal  is,  the  aged 
slave  has  inherited  a  young  master.  So  the  inheritance 
account  is  balanced  by  its  equality.  And  if  the  young  master 


EXTRACTS  FROM  KEPLY  TO  THE  JUNIUS  TRACT.    397 

sells  his  aged  slave,  then  the  slave  has  got  a  new  master, 
which,  according  to  Mr.  Colton  and  the  Whig  party,  is  like 
an  old  widower  getting  a  new  wife.  For  Mr.  Colton  com- 
pared slavery  to  the  marriage  relation,  as  one  of  its  most 
fitting  illustrations.  The  master  sells  the  slave's  wife  and 
children,  whom  the  slave  father  sees  no  more :  Mr.  Colton, 
the  Whig  party  and  the  slaveholders  would  tell  you,  that  he, 
the  slave,  may  get  him  a  new  wife,  for  if  a  man  lose  his  wife 
and  children  by  sale,  may  he  not  get  him  a  new  wife  ?  It 
matters  not  how  the  slave  loses  them. 

Mr.  Colton  is  right,  in  one  respect — showing  a  strong 
resemblance  between  a  child  of  the  master  and  his  slave. 
The  child  at  two  years  of  age  is  ignorant,  does  not  know 
how  to  read,  write  or  cipher.  So  the  slave  at  forty  resem- 
bles, in  these  respects,  the  child  at  two.  Mr.  Colton  con- 
tends the  master  is  bound  to  feed  and  clothe  the  slave.  So 
is  the  owner  bound  to  feed  and  stable  his  poor  plough-horse, 
and  upon  the  same  ground  the  horse  can  prosecute,  accord- 
ing to  Mr.  Colton,  for  neglect  to  stable  and  oat  him,  the 
same  as  the  slave  may  sue  or  indict  for  neglect  to  feed  and 
clothe  him.  True,  the  community  might  indict  the  man  who 
abused  the  horse,  or  the  slave,  out  of  all  reason,  if  they  felt 
disposed. 

But  the  first  case  is  yet  to  be  seen  in  a  court  of  justice, 
where  a  southern  man  has  been  indicted  for  overworking, 
underfeeding,  and  not  clothing  a  slave.  The  first  case  at 
the  North  is  yet  to  be  tried,  of  overworking  and  underfeed- 
ing among  the  tens  of  thousands  of  poor,  abused,  starved 
skeletons  of  horses.  Yet  the  power  of  redress,  as  it  regards 
the  slave  and  horse,  are  exactly  equal.  The  slave  has  the 
same  right  to  go  before  a  grand  jury  and  state  his  case,  on 
oath,  against  his  master,  as  the  horse  has.  His  oath  is  not 
allowed  against  the  master,  or  any  white,  in  any  case,  or 
received  at  all. 


SELECTIONS. 

OKGAXIZATION. 

A  NEW  epoch  opens.  The  straitness  of  the  times  tasks  the 
genius  of  humanity  to  fresh  efforts.  The  Reformation  cannot 
be  carried  by  the  A.  S.  newspaper,  or  the  hired  agent.  We 
commend  and  love  them  both,  but  they  are  high-priced 
instrumentalities.  "We  cannot  cultivate  mountain  land  with 
a  plough  of  gold.  Slavery  has  invaded  our  purses  ;  slavery 
demands  the  earnings  of  Friday  and  Saturday  of  the  North 
as  a  union  tax ;  we  pay  it.  Bankruptcy  is  the  return  cargo 
from  the  South.  One  man  in  five  works  at  the  South  ;  nine 
out  of  ten  work  at  the  North,  or  the  nation  would  perish. 
The  South  pay  their  debts  with  the  bankrupt's  certificates — 
that  is  their  circulating  medium,  as  individuals.  Repudiation 
in  a  State  is  piracy  in  individuals.  Slavery  slays  by  violence, 
one  slave  in  each  of  the  13  States  daily.  They  fall  by  cruelty, 
overworking,  underfeeding,  and  in  nameless  other  ways. 
The  North  looks  on.  She  sees  the  writhing  victims  on  the 
Union's  altar ;  she  hears  their  groans.  These  Union  victims, 
whose  blood  flows  on  the  altar  of  the  confederation,  amount 
to  4,745.  The  Christian  religion  is  abolished  wherever 
slavery  comes  to  be  a  legal  institution.  When  Atheism  is 
established  by  law,  the  Christian  religion  is  repealed  by  law. 
Slavery  is  the  converse  of  every  proposition  in  Christianity ; 
whoever  sustains  it  in  Church  or  State,  does  it  at  the  expense 
of  Christianity. 

ABOLITION   CONVENTIONS, 

Our  Conventions  heretofore  held  have  adopted,  whether  as 

396 


SELECTIONS.  399 

town,  county  or  State,  the  mode  of  sending  out  a  committee 
to  report  resolutions.  These  resolutions  have  generally  been 
affirmative  or  negative  propositions,  touching  slavery  in  the 
Church  and  State,  affirming  what  we  ought  and  ought  not  to 
believe  and  do.  Or,  in  other  words,  we  have  spent  the  last 
seven  years  in  a  circle  of  splendid  abstractions,  or  golden 
affirmations  of  what  was  or  was  not  the  truth,  seeming  to 
think  if  we  could  once  mark  a  proposition  as  true,  on  a  ten 
hour  discussion,  that  was  enough ;  and,  in  fact,  we  have  acted 
as  though  our  ten  thousand  resolves  had,  by  our  vote,  the 
breath  of  life  breathed  into  them,  and  that  henceforth  they 
would  fly  like  an  angel  of  mercy  through  the  world,  under 
our  new  embodiment,  as  a  sort  of  everlasting  agent  of  truth, 
not  subject  to  any  of  the  laws  of  our  common  mortality.  But 
our  abstract  propositions  had  no  longer  legs  nor  lai'ger  hands 
after  we  had  passed  them  than  before  ;  and  yet  we  congratu- 
late ourselves  in  having  fifteen  or  twenty  resolutions,  dis- 
cussed or  undiscussed.  It  might  often  be  said  that  a  favorite 
polemical  controversy  would  spring  out  of  a  single  resolution, 
and  use  up  the  entire  time  of  a  Convention.  In  reviewing 
the  past,  without  being  too  censorious,  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  we  seemed  to  act  as  if  we  had  only  to  pass  a  resolution  to 
organize  the  State,  and  distribute  light  in  every  corner  of  the 
same — as  though  we  had  really  done  the  work  by  passing  the 
resolution.  We  almost  mistook  our  resolutions  for  their  per- 
formance. We  were  too  well  satisfied  with  resolving  to  do 
instead  of  doing.  We  spent  our  energies  in  establishing  our 
abstractions  as  first  principles,  and  gave  but  little  time  to 
the  practical  carrying  out  of  the  same,  infinitely  the  most 
important. 

THE    SLAVEHOLDIXG    O1INIBFS. 

The  agitation  growing  out  of  Texas  reveals  the  fact  that 
this  Government  was  from  the  beginning,  and  now  is,  a  mere 


4:00  ALVAN    STEWAKT. 

slaveliolding  omnibus  to  carry  slaveholders  and  their  bag- 
gage, and  that  we  at  the  North  have  had  to  feed  the 
horses,  make  the  roads  and  keep  the  omnibus  in  repair,  for 
the  naked  reputation  of  having  a  right  to  ride  in  the  omnibus, 
though  we  have  to  go  on  foot,  run  in  the  dust,  shouting  that 
we  have  equal  right  to  ride  with  those  inside.  The  North  have 
just  discovered  we  are  running  by  the  side  of  the  omnibus, 
which  is  loaded  down  with  slaveholders,  slaves,  chains,  hand- 
cuffs, whips,  bloodhounds  and  slaveholding  constructions  of 
the  Constitution,  done  up  in  bundles,  labelled,  "  For  the  addle- 
headed  of  the  North."  Another  bundle,  entitled  "Slave- 
holding  Constitutional  Compromises,"  lately  discovered  by 
the  grandson  of  one  of  the  framers  of  the  Constitution,  show- 
ing that  the  true  cabalistic  reading  of  the  Constitution  is,  that 
where  the  word  liberty  occurs  therein,  it  means  "slavery" — 
where  the  word  justice,  there  read  "injustice  or  oppression" — 
where  any  word  soever  in  the  Constitution  like  these,  "  the 
United  States  shall  guarantee  to  each  State  a  republican  form 
of  government,"  they  are  to  be  rejected  as  entire  surplusage, 
as  has  been  the  case  ia  the  admission  of  eight  slaveholding 
new  States — practical  construction  thereon  by  Congress. 
There  was  another  bun  die  entitled  "  Forgeries  or  Discoveries," 
that  the  words  in  the  Constitution  "  No  person  shall  be  de- 
prived of  life,  liberty  or  property  without  due  process,"  is 
falsely  printed  hi  all  the  editions  of  the  Constitution  extant, 
and  that  the  true  original  was  framed  and  adopted  in  these 
words :  "  Men  or  women  who  are  weak,  Mulattoes,  Quadroons, 
eights  or  sixteenths,  thirty-seconds,  or  sixty-fourths,  or  where 
sixty-three  drops  of  their  blood  is  Anglo-Saxon  and  one  drop 
African,  in  origin,  and  in  that  proportion,  shall  be  deprived 
of  life,  liberty,  and  property,  without  due  process  of  law." 
Also  one  other  bundle  entitled,  "  An  astounding  discovery 
just  come  to  light  in  Florida,  said  to  be  discovered  in  the 
hollow  of  a  tree,  on  which  fugitive  slaves  had  ascended  to 


SELECTIONS.  401 

escape  the  rage  of  the  pursuing  bloodhounds — a  most  won- 
derful document  on  parchment,  showing  that  the  Constitution 
was  made  for  nothing  else  except  as  a  slave-breeding,  slave- 
voting,  slave-working,  slave-selling,  slave-pursuing  and  catch- 
ing document."  The  North  have  made  more  discoveries 
about  the  omnibus  and  its  contents  in  the  last  six  months 
than  in  the  last  forty  years  before. 

THE   GREAT   EVERY-MAN  POWER. 

On  the  day  of  the  morning  of  the  famous  battle  of  Trafalgar, 
by  Lord  Nelson  against  the  French,  the  English  Admiral 
caused  a  piece  of  white  cotton  about  one  hundred  feet  long 
and  twenty-five  feet  wide,  with  letters  four  or  five  feet  long 
to  be  inscribed  thereon  and  fastened  to  the  masthead  of  the 
Admiral's  ship,  that  it  might  be  seen  by  every  man  to  be 
engaged  throughout  the  fleet.  The  words  were  : ."  ENGLAND 
EXPECTS  EVERY  MAN  TO  DO  HIS  DUTY."  Oh  !  the  enthusiastic 
shout  that  went  up  from  England's  tars  at  the  sight : 
thousands  of  whom  saw  the  sun  rise  this  morn  for  the  last 
time  forever.  The  anti-slavery  host  expect  every  liberty 
man  will  do  his  duty.  The  great  secret  of  successful  prose- 
cution of  the  anti-slavery  conquest  is  yet  unrevealed,  and 
where  revealed  is  not  believed.  The  simplicity  of  means  is 
so  amazing,  men  will  not  believe  it.  It  is  the  great  every- 
man  power,  the  one-man  power,  the  common-manpower,  the 
unlearned-man  power.  Every  honest  anti-slavery  man  has 
the  power  of  converting  some  of  his  neighbors  to  our  glorious 
principles,  in  the  next  five  weeks  by  talking,  by  tract,  news- 
paper, or  pamphlet.  A  man  of  the  smallest  intellect,  is  a 
stronger,  a  wiser  and  a  better  man,  when  armed  in  the  pano- 
ply of  eternal  justice,  mercy  and  equality,  surrounded  and 
trusting  to  these  principles,  to  bear  him  up,  than  the  greatest 
intellectual  Goliah,  who  even  defied  the  armies  of  the  living 
God,  trusting  to  his  weaver's  beam  of  falsehood  and  lies, 


402  ALVAN    STEWART. 

polished  with  the  tinsel  of  the  devil's  rhetorical  varnish. 
One  ounce  of  truth  will  make  the  beam  kick  with  a  ton  of 
lies. 

MYRON   HOLLEY. 

The  Convention  at  Rochester,  on  the  12th,  13th,  and  14th 
inst.  (June  1844)  was  one  of  the  largest  ever  held  in  this 
State.  In  addition  to  the  convention  proper,  thousands  of 
the  citizens  of  Rochester  and  parts  adjacent,  joined  in  a  grate- 
ful tribute  of  respect  to  one  of  the  most  illustrious  men  of  the 
Empire  State.  Yes,  Myron  Holley's  shaft  of  granite,  some 
11  or  32  feet  in  height,  weighing  between  five  and  six  tons, 
will  stand  commemorating,  from  generation  to  generation, 
from  century  to  century,  the  high  born  purposes  of  his  ma- 
jestic soul,  as  long  as  the  quiet  Genesee  shall  glide  at  the 
base  of  Mount  Hope,  bearing  on  its  bosom  the  tears  of  the 
pilgrim-visiter  to  this  city  of  silence,  and  will  reveal  to  the 
great  unborn,  that  men  lived  on  the  earth  in  1844,  who  ac- 
knowledged the  power  of  genius,  and  honored  a  brave  hu- 
manity, in  a  pusillanimous  age,  and  have  left  this  imperishable 
testimony  as  an  incentive  to  all  who  have  the  inclination  and 
power  to  follow  his  glorious  example. 

NEW   YORK   BOWING   TO   VIRGINIA. 

The  conduct  of  Gov.  Bouck  is  looked  upon  as  .1  base  bow- 
ing of  the  State  of  New  York  to  slaveholding,  despotic  Vir- 
ginia. The  craven  conduct  of  Bouck  will  ruin  his  reputation 
in  ah1  coming  time — the  unmanliness  of  submitting  on  our 
knees  to  Virginia,  while  she  holds  an  unconstitutional  law 
over  our  heads,  and  the  heads  of  ah1  the  navigators  of  our 
ships,  compelling  us  New-Yorkers,  every  time  one  of  our 
ships  touches  her  coasts,  to  pay  $10  of  tribute  money,  and 
give  bonds  that  we  will  not  steal  negroes  while  on  her  coasts, 
or  hi  her  waters.  Bouck  seeks  this  moment  of  onr  degrada- 


SELECTIONS.  403 

tiou  to  make  us  play  the  spaniel,  and  lick  the  feet  of  our  mas- 
ters by  telling  them  that  we  will  repeal  our  Jury  Trial  Law, 
the  bulwark  of  Liberty,  and  pass  a  Nine  Month  law  over 
again,  so  that  Virginia  may  bring,  work,  hire,  whip  and  fetter 
her  slaves  on  our  soil  nine  months  at  a  time,  in  one  year. 
Oh !  degraded  New  York  !  Oh,  must  New  York  bend  her 
gallant  Empire  head,  while  women-whipping  Virginia  puts 
the  yoke  on  our  degraded  necks,  and  keys  the  bow  f 

I  returned  from  this  last  journey  worn  down,  and  all  but 
sick,  but  feel  to-day  as  though  I  might  still  work  for  the  helpless. 

A   CLERGYMAN   UPHOLDING   SLAVERY. 

Another  of  the  most  prominent  of  the  clergy  fell  into  a 
passion,  and  very  earnestly  asserted  that  "Slavery  was  a 
Bible  institution,  and  its  use  was  proper  like  any  other 
institution,  and  its  abuse  was  the  only  thing  that  was 
wrong," — as  the  relation  of  husband  and  wife,  was  a  very 
good  relation,  but  the  husband  may  abuse  the  wife — that 
abuse  is  wrong.  Oh !  my  countrymen,  when  such  miserable 
men  crawl  into  the  pulpits,  to  insult  God,  and  the  Christian 
religion,  and  become  teachers  of  the  road,  not  to  heaven, 
what  can  you  expect  but  all  manner  of  corruption  and  dege- 
neracy in  the  public  mind  ?  What  terrible  responsibility 
must  lie  on  that  man  who  charges  atheistically  on  the  great 
and  good  God  of  the  Universe,  the  horrible  crime  of  slavery  ? 
A  crime  which  unites  within  itself  all  crimes,  which  expunges 
the  decalogue,  and  insults  and  treads  under  foot  the  divine 
virtues  of  Christ,  and  strips  the  Christian  religion  of  every 
beauty,  and  charges  on  the  deity  the  crime  of  giving  one  half 
of  his  children  to  be  used  as  slaves  by  the  others.  If  the 
father  of  ten  sons  were  to  give  the  five  youngest  to  be  slaves 
of  the  five  oldest,  in  the  county  of  Oneida,  every  man,  wo- 
man and  child,  for  one  hundred  miles  around,  would  cry 
monster !  monster  !  !  monster ! ! !  Monster,  would  be  writ- 


404:  ALVAN  STEWABT. 

ten  on  his  fence,  his  house,  his  barn,  if  men  dared  come  so 
near  him.  This  man  would  be  supposed  to  be  a  connecting 
link  between  Judas  Iscariot  and  Beelzebub.  Yes,  he  would 
occupy  the  seat  of  professor  of  moral  depravity !  He  would 
be  considered  the  impersonification  of  the  extinct  and  for- 
gotten depravities  of  Sodom  and  Gomorrah,  embellished 
with  all  the  acquisitions  of  modern  crime. 

ORIGIN-  AND   OBJECT   OF   COXSTTTUTIOXS. 

The  different  States  of  this  Republic  are  the  only  ones 
who  date  their  political  existence  from  the  adoption  of 
written  constitutions.  The  beginning  of  the  nations  of 
Europe,  reaching  far  beyond  the  era  of  printing,  is  generally 
lost  in  the  mists  hanging  over  distant  periods  of  time,  if  not 
absolutely  concealed  in  the  darkness  of  an  impenetrable  nnti- 
quity.  Fable  and  mythology,  as  to  the  origin  of  many  of  the 
nations  of  Europe,  constitute  much  the  larger  share  of  their 
history ;  and  conjecture,  at  last,  amidst  the  conflicts  of  tra- 
dition, is  the  strongest  light  we  can  bring  to  bear  upon  the 
night  of  distant  years. 

The  constitutions  of  the  States  of  this  Republic  are  among 
the  most  august  and  certain  of  human  memorials,  or  national 
records ;  existing  hi  thousands  of  forms,  and  in  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  places,  being  each  but  a  duplicate  of  the  sacred  ori- 
ginal. The  constitutions  of  the  different  nations  of  Europe 
seem  to  be  a  succession  of  lost  rights,  recovered  at  different 
points  of  time  ;  and  in  some  great  state  emergency,  by  insur- 
rection, or  revolution,  have  been  extorted  from  the  fears  or 
necessities  of  the  ruling  prince.  These  successive  recoveries 
in  many  of  the  kingdoms  of  Europe,  go  by  the  name  of  the 
constitutions  of  their  countries,  which  are  more  properly 
subversions  of  some  ancient  despotism,  than  constitutions. 

But  the  Constitution  of  these  Republics,  both  State  and 
national,  were  formed  for  the  mutual  protection  and  defence 


SELECTIONS.  405 

of  the  persons,  liberties,  and  property  of  the  people ;  not 
carving  these  immunities  out  of  the  despotic  power  lodged 
in  the  hands  of  some  weak  prince,  but  simply  agreeing  how 
to  employ  the  great  inheritance  given  them  by  the  King  of 
kings,  and  Lord  of  lords,  for  the  defence  and  protection  of 
each  one,  in  the  enjoyment  of  his  natural  rights  given  to  each 
one  by  his  creator.  The  distinctive  character  of  the  Ame- 
rican constitutions,  is  this,  that  a  State  Constitution  is  a 
covenant  or  agreement  of  the  entire  persons  of  the  State, 
with  each  person,  as  an  individual,  to  protect  and  defend  him 
or  her  in  their  natural  and  acquired  rights,  while  each  indivi- 
dual covenants  and  agrees  to  sustain,  with  his  person  and 
estate,  the  commonwealth.  Or  in  other  words,  a  constitu- 
tion for  a  State  or  the  nation,  is  a  covenant  of  the  whole 
people  with  each  person,  and  of  each  person  with  the  whole 
people.  A  constitution  is  the  most  solemn  expression  of  human 
weakness,  and  of  single  person's  inability  to  protect  and  de- 
fend themselves  from  the  avarice,  cruelty,  and  violence  of 
others,  therefore,  the  whole  confederate  with  each,  and  each 
with  the  whole,  to  secure  the  enjoyment  of  our  God-inherited 
rights.  Constitutions  are  formed  to  protect  natural  rights, 
not  to  create  them.  Every  man  has  a  right  to  pursue  his 
own  happiness,  in  whatever  way  he  pleases,  unless  it  violates 
his  obligations  to  God,  or  the  rights  of  his  fellow-man. 

It  is  the  great  mistake  of  many,  to  suppose,  a  constitution 
can,  or  does  form  the  source  of  our  natural  rights,  and  that 
we  derive  the  right  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happi- 
ness, from-our  constitutions.  We  do  not  derive  our  title  to 
our  farms  from  the  fences  which  surround  them,  but  from 
deeds  and  patents,  originating  in  the  supreme  power  of  the 
State ;  so  our  constitutions,  both  State  and  national,  are  so 
many  walls  of  defence  around  our  natural  rights,  which  we 
hold  by  a  deed,  patent  from  the  Almighty.  No  man  is  capa- 
ble for  himself,  or  for  another,  to  enter  into  a  compact  or  a 


406  ALVAN   STEWART. 

constitution,  to  forego,  sacrifice,  or  surrender  up,  while  in  a 
state  of  innocence,  his  natural  rights  to  life,  liberty,  and  the 
pursuit  of  happiness.  Can  any  man  believe  a  man  would 
concur  in  making  a  constitution,  which  not  only  refuses  to 
protect  his  natural  rights  to  life,  liberty,  property,  and  the 
pursuit  of  happiness,  but  absolutely  annihilates  those  rights 
— yes,  instead  of  obtaining  protection  for  his  natural  rights, 
he  comes  forward,  as  some  argue,  and  agrees  he  has  no  natu- 
ral rights,  and  that  they  are  extinguished.  Where  is  the 
man  on  the  wide  earth,  who  was  ever  found  so  out  of  love 
with  himself  and  his  posterity,  and  so  devoid  of  reason,  as  to 
consent,  in  person,  or  clothe  a  delegate  with  power,  in  making 
the  fence  around  his  farm  for  his  protection,  finally  to  agree, 
that  his  title-deeds  to  his  farm  should  be  torn  up  and  de- 
stroyed, and  that  he  and  his  family  might  be  turned  head- 
long into  the  street,  and  his  house  and  barn  be  burnt  to  the 
ground  ? 

If  no  man  ever  exercised  in  person  or  by  delegate  the 
power  of  self-extinction,  in  making  a  constitution,  where  was 
that  power  acquired  in  a  constitution,  which  is  an  agreement 
of  the  whole  with  each,  and  each  with  the  whole,  to  destroy 
human  rights  and  blot  out  the  manhood  of  our  race,  instead 
of  nourishing  and  defending  man's  natural  rights?  If  slavery 
crept  into  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  (which  is 
denied),  by  what  possible  means,  unless  by  the  most  melan- 
choly insanity  ? 

Shall  it  be  said,  that  part  of  the  people,  a  minority,  instead 
of  wishing  protection  for  their  natural  rights,  concluded  that 
their  share  under  this  Constitution,  should  be  a  perpetual 
power  on  the  part  of  the  majority  of  the  great  national 
brotherhood,  to  extinguish  the  natural  rights  of  the  minority, 
and  make  them  and  their  posterity  slaves  and  chattels,  in  all 
time,  and  all  that  they,  the  minority  asked,  was,  that  this 
great  compromise  might  be  kept  inviolable,  in  all  coming 


SELECTIONS.  407 

ages,  as  the  key-stone  of  the  federal  arch  ?  This  is  sublime 
absurdity.  But  where,  how,  or  when,  was  the  power  for  the 
creation  and  adoption  of  the  federal  Constitution  gained,  ex- 
cept by  the  consent  in  person,  or  through  delegates  freely 
elected  ?  Who  ever  heard  of  a  constitution  founded  on  this 
continent  for  the  destruction  of  human  rights  and  the  blast- 
ing of  human  hopes  ? 

No  doubt  a  charter  party  might  have  been  entered  into  to 
prosecute  and  carry  on  piracy  and  man-stealing  to  and  from 
the  ill-fated  continent  of  Africa,  for  a  single  year,  or  a  single 
voyage  ;  but  in  what  land  of  civilization,  has  it  ever  reached 
our  ears,  that  a  great  nation  ever  met  to  form  a  constitution 
for  the  protection  of  the  majority,  and  for  the  perpetual  de- 
struction of  the  minority  ? 

The  very  idea  of  a  constitution  implies,  that  those  for 
whom  it  is  made  are  to  gain  thereby,  and  not  become  losers ! 
A  constitution  is  to  create  a  national  or  state  partnership  ;  in 
which  the  partners  are  all  equal ;  each  brings  the  same 
amount  of  capital  for  the  public  weal,  each  brings  the  same 
right  to  be  protected  ;  the  life,  liberty  and  pursuit  of  happi- 
ness of  every  one,  is,  in  the  eye  of  the  Constitution,  equal  to 
that  of  any  other.  But  according  to  the  theory  and  practice 
of  the  slaveholders  and  pro-slavery  parties  of  this  land,  after 
five-sixths  of  the  population  came  up  to  create  and  adopt  the 
Constitution,  pointing  out  the  great  self-evident  rights  each 
wished  more  securely  to  be  protected,  by  this  Constitution, 
the  last  sixth  of  the  people  arrived  and  declared  themselves 
equally  anxious  for  the  adoption  of  this  Constitution,  in  order 
constitutionally  to  dispossess  themselves  of  their  natural 
rights,  and  get  rid  of  their  heaven-inherited  legacy  of  life, 
liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  and  wished  the  same 
instrument,  which  brought  protection,  life  and  liberty  to  the 
five-sixths,  might  by  construction  and  interpretation  of  the 
same  instrument,  when  applied  to  the  last  sixth,  be  construed 


408  ALVAN   STEWART. 

so  as  to  strip  them  of  all  protection,  and  their  natural  rights, 
and  make  them  slaves,  chattels  and  outlaws  forever. 

But  slaveholders  and  their  apologists  can  find  no  more 
substantial  grounds  on  which  to  place  this  mighty  platform 
of  human  rights,  than  the  foregoing  absurdities. 


EXTRACTS  FROM 

KEPLY  TO  THE  DEMOCEATIC  KEYIEW. 

February,  1845. 
ABOLITIOXISTS,   THE   BALANCE-POWER  PARTY. 

THE  reviewer  says,  "  Abolition  has  certainly  grown  now 
into  an  important  political  fact."  Again  he  says,  "  it  is  not 
to  be  denied  that  at  the  late  election,  partly  from  accidental 
circumstances,  and  partly  from  its  own  strength,  yet  still 
practically  as  a  fact,  it  has  been  able  to  hold,  quivering  in  its 
own  mad  hand,  the  balance  of  power  between  the  two  great 
parties  of  the  country."  The  reviewer  then  asserts  that  the 
Abolitionists  of  the  State  of  New  York  held  the  Presi- 
dential election  in  their  hands,  and  the  control  of  the  elec- 
tions and  political  power  of  the  Empire  State,  and  had  power 
to  have  given  these  rich  prizes  of  human  ambition  to  either 
side  they  had  seen  fit.  He  then  inquires,  "  has  it  come  to 
this  ?  Has  Abolitionism  held  in  its  power  the  arbitrament 
of  this  great  national  issue  ?"  He  says,  "  political  abolition 
is  no  joke.  It  is  a  something,  though  it  be  only  a  wild  bull 
loose  in  the  streets."  Again  he  says,  "  we  cannot  refuse  to 
confess  how  narrowly  we  have  escaped  being  fatally  gored* 
by  its  horn.  Should  we  have  escaped  if  Mr.  Clay  had  not 
published  his  Alabama  pro-Texas  letter  ?"  Taking  the  admis- 
sions of  this  literary  organ  and  distinguished  mouth-piece 
of  the  great  conquering  plurality  and  minority  of  the  twenty 
millions  flushed  with  an  unexpected  victory,  big  with 
buoyant  exultation,  reposing  in  the  banqueting-house,  amidst 
the  I'oaring  of  cannon  and  the  shouts  of  multitudes,  about 
18  409 


410  ALVAN   STEWART. 

to  wield  the  destinies  of  the  great  nation  of  the  new 
world  for  long  years  to  come — to  them,  for  good  or  for 
evil,  the  mighty  power  of  the  Republic,  with  its  vast  respon- 
sibilities, is  vouchsafed.  Still  this  same  triumphant  party,  in 
the  moment  of  their  wonderful  success,  admit  that  the 
Liberty  party  Abolitionists  might  have  sent  them  into  a 
polar  winter's  night  of  political  ostracism,  where  they  might 
have  had  an  abundance  of  time  to  have  made  an  inventory 
of  their  losses,  and  have  compiled  their  criminating  statistics, 
revealing  the  sources  of  their  disasters,  and  the  causes  of 
their  overthrow  by  force  of  the  great  gorings,  and  the  un- 
speakable and  prodigious  roarings  of  that  tremendous  Aboli- 
tion butt  of  1844. 

Let  us  pause,  and  for  one  moment  examine,  by  the  light  of 
the  foregoing  admissions  of  this  distinguished  professor  of 
elemental  Democracy,  as  to  the  fact.  What  other  balance- 
power  party  has  ever  been  found  before,  in  this  nation  or  in 
any-  other,  which  pursued  such  a  course  for  its  own  exalted 
object,  in  unshaken  neutrality,  spurning  the  golden  bribe 
laid  at  its  feet,  refusing  by  a  transfer  of  its  numbers  to  either 
side  to  win,  by  its  preponderance,  the  casting  vote  of  an 
empire's  power?  "While  two  great  parties  sought  power,  for 
the  honor  and  profit  of  its  exejrcise,  limiting  its  blessings  to 
the  Anglo-Saxon  caste,  a  third  party  refused  its  acceptance 
without  sharing  it  with  every  human  being  of  the  republic, 
high  or  low,  bond  or  free,  rich  or  poor,  ignorant  or  learned, 
determining  thereby  in  the  end  to  overthrow  slavery,  and 
>  exalt  men  to  that  level  where  the  Declaration  of  Indepen- 
dence left  them. 

DEMOCRATIC   PROFESSION   AXD    PRACTICE. 

What  but  the  consciousness  of  patriotism  could  have  in- 
fluenced the  Liberty  party  Abolitionists,  and  sustained  them 
amidst  dangers  so  threatening,  temptations  so  flattering, 


REPLY   TO   THE   DEMOCRATIC   REVIEW.  411 

opposition  so  overwhelming  ?  Where  is  the  case  known  in 
our  annals  of  a  party  refusing  homage  and  empire ;  yes  all 
that  could  fascinate  the  vulgar,  or  charm  the  refined,  excite 
the  selfish  or  stimulate  the  generous ;  for  the  ambitious  there 
was  place ;  for  the  sordid  there  was  gold  ;  and  the  caresses 
of  success  might  have  saluted  the  huzzas  of  millions  in  the 
pride  of  conquest. 

Yes,  the  Liberty  party  was  firm  in  occupying  its  unchange- 
able position,  taken  on  the  first  of  April,  1840,  by  which  it  re- 
fused to  give  a  vote  for  a  slaveholder,  or  his  apologist,  from  con- 
stable to  President.  Although  near  two-thirds  of  their  num- 
bers were  gentlemen  from  the  Whig  ranks,  and  were  keenly 
sensible  that  in  the  last  ten  years  they  had  received  injuries 
from  the  Democratic  party,  which  for  magnitude  and  mean- 
ness had  no  parallel ;  the  chronicles  of  man's  history  may  be 
searched  in  vain  through  centuries  before  the  seeker  of 
truth  would  have  found  the  same  amount  of  servility  sub- 
mitted to,  by  so  large  a  number  of  human  beings,  since  the 
dawn  of  civilization  in  any  ten  years  o4  a  nation's  life,  ancient 
or  modern,  for  so  small  consideration  as  has  satisfied  the 
Democratic  party  of  the  United  States  to  be  false  to  herself, 
unfaithful  to  her  age,  and  derelict  to  every  abstraction  of 
belief  she  professed,  as  if  it  was  her  chief  joy  to  place  an 
impassable  gulf  between  practice  and  profession,  and  that  her 
works  should  prosecute  a  ceaseless  war  upon  her  faith. 

The  President,  on  the  4th  of  March,  1837,  in  his  inaugural 
address,  when  taking  upon  himself  the  oflicial  oath — Heaven's 
sanction  for  Earth's  performance — swearing  by  the  retribu- 
tion of  that  great  day,  when  president  and  people,  governors 
and  governed,  slaves  and  masters,  should  each  stand  alone, 
to  answer  for  himself  before  Omniscient  Justice,  yet,  in  such 
an  hour  of  time,  he  promises,  in  effect,  to  violate  the  Consti- 
tution, and  veto  any  bill  that  might  be  passed  for  the  eman- 
cipation of  slaves  in  the  District  of  Columbia. 


412  ALT  AN   6TEWAKT. 

This  was  the  boldest  criminality  in  attempt,  this  was 
sacrilege  of  the  high  priest  in  the  temple,  and  high  treason  in 
the  coronation  oath ;  he  abjured  man  in  distress,  and  fore- 
swore our  common  humanity  and  made  the  Constitution 
and  American  institutions,  so  far  as  president  could  make 
them,  by  his  fiat  alone,  a  cow-hide  oligarchy,  and  the  will 
of  the  ten  millions  of  the  North,  and  the  non-slaveholding 
white  millions  of  the  South,  was  paralyzed,  and  the  slave- 
holding  ukase  henceforth  was  the  government,  and  the  title 
deeds  to  the  blood-purchased  institutions  of  our  ancestors 
were  not  worth  the  space  they  occupied,  or  the  paper  and 
parchment  on  which  they  were  written. 

REVERSE   THEORIES. 

If  we  must  always  make  war  on  what  we  profess,  would  to 
heaven,  our  political  theories  could  be  reversed,  and  that  our 
abstractions  were,  universal  inequality,  and  that  man  had  the 
abstract  right  to  enslave  and  imbrute  his  fellow-man,  that 
superior  brute  force  was  the  great  rule  of  right,  and  that  the 
strong  might  do  what  they  pleased  to  the  weak. 

DEMOCRATS  SUCCUMB  TO  SOUTHERN  THREATS. 

In  ten  thousand  ways,  for  the  last  ten  years,  the  Northern 
democracy,  until  this  winter,  bowed,  with  the  submissive- 
ness  of  the  scourged  slave,  at  the  crack  of  the  whip,  to  the 
every  command  of  the  haughty  slaveholder,  with  the  ever- 
lasting threat  in  their  mouths:  "flinch  in  stabbing  liberty 
here,  or  liberty  there  ;  or  the  executioner,  with  his  basket  of 
sawdust,  shall  move  before  you,  and  when  you  look  again 
you  shall  behold  the  headless  trunk  of  Martin,  the  supple." 
Will  not  such  fearful  menaces  be  the  best  apology  the  Demo- 
cratic party  can  offer  to  the  impartial  historian,  when  the 
record  of  man's  accountability  to  man  shall  be  unrolled  ? 


JREPLY  TO  THE  DEMOCEATIC  REVIEW.  413 

SLAVERY'S  DECEIT. 

If  the  slaveholders  had  not  cheated  their  dupes,  at  last,  it 
would  have  been  an  inconsistency  of  conduct  which  criti- 
cism itself  has  never  been  able  to  discover  or  fasten  on  their 
peculiar  institutions. 

FANCY     STOCK. 

Neither  party  pretended  it  came  within  the  scope  of  their 
commissions,  to  reduce  our  American  abstractions  to  prac- 
tice. Though  it  is  not  denied,  that  either  of  the  two  great 
parties  had  an  immense  amount  of  fancy  stock  in  abstrac- 
tions, sufficient,  if  the  capital  was  but  paid  in,  to  cleanse  the 
terraqueous  globe  from  all  crime,  wrong  or  impropriety, 
which  have  disgraced  the  annals  of  man. 

SERVILITY    OF   THE   DEMOCRATS. 

We  cannot  hope  to  impress  men  who  are  so  well  satisfied 
with  the  objectless  victory,  lately  obtained  by  the  democratic 
party,  as  the  editor  of  the  "  Democratic  Review  "  is — who 
regard  government  as  a  job,  made  for  the  benefit  of  its  ad- 
ministrators, who  could  conceive  no  higher  object  in  making 
a  canal,  than  to  be  the  excavating  contractors  and  its  lock 
tenders,  nor  any  higher  motive  for  building  a  turnpike,  than 
the  chance  of  erecting  the  gate  house,  or  being  toll  collector. 
It  may  be  matter  of  regret,  that  men,  who  so  poorly  appreci- 
ate the  end  and  object  of  a  Republican  government,  should 
be  intrusted  with  its  control,  still  we  may  pity  them,  in  their 
success,  as  time  lost  to  their  race,  during  their  power ;  but  as 
a  party  they  have  long  been  bent  double  in  a  shameless  and 
craven  posture,  before  the  slave  power,  awaiting  the  shaking 
of  the  crumb  cloth  ;  charity  therefore,  compels  us  to  admit, 
that  the  rigidity  of  their  muscles  will  not  bear  an  instanta- 
neous perpendicularity  of  the  body — from  the  horizontal  to 


414  ALVAN   STEWART. 

the  rectilinear  extension  of  the  tendons,  and  therefore  we  fear 
that  years  must  pass  before  they  can  look  the  zenith  in  its 
face.  And  you  have  bowed  and  cast  your  modest  eyes  to 
the  ground,  as  your  masters  from  these  States  spurned  peti- 
tions for  enslaved  men ;  reviled  free  labor  institutions, 
declared  slavery  the  chief  comer  stone  of  a  Republic,  and  per- 
mitted their  twenty-three  slave  counted  three-fifth  represent- 
atives ever  and  anon  to  pull  your  beards,  and  threaten  the 
dissolution  of  the  Union,  and  you  said  "  sweet  masters,  oh  ! 
do  not,"  and  trembled. 

Has  not  the  Democratic  party,  by  the  command  of  their 
masters,  for  twelve  years  gone  by,  until  the  repeal  of  the 
25th  Rule — at  all  times  and  on  all  occasions,  stood  in  the  cen- 
tre of  the  path,  with  a  drawn  sword,  facing  and  obstructing 
every  movement  of  humanity,  for  the  amelioration  of  the  free 
colored  man,  the  emancipation  of  the  slave,  or  the  rescue  of 
free  labor  institutions,  from  the  indignities  of  slaveholders  ? 

The  Liberty  party  go  for  the  Constitution  unchanged,  as 
the  great  palladium  of  human  liberty.  "We  go  for  the  entire 
Union,  slavery  in,  or  slavery  out,  Texas  in  or  Texas  out ; 
we  will  never  give  up  one  inch  of  the  soil  of  our  stupendous 
republic,  to  unmanly  compromise,  but  will  contend  at  the 
ballot  box,  with  rendered  reasons  in  our  votes,  and  argu- 
ments in  our  mouths,  made  of  justice  and  of  truth,  to-day,  to- 
morrow and  to  our  lives'  ends ;  and  leave  the  bequest  to  our 
children,  to  purify  the  pilgrim  land  of  the  New  "World  from 
slavery  and  make  this  land  the  theatre  for  accomplishing  the 
desire  of  nations,  by  raising  man  through  justice  and  know- 
ledge to  the  summit  level  of  man's  glorious  capabilities.  Mr. 
Reviewer,  is  this  madness  which  alarms,  injustice  that 
startles,  innovation  that  terrifies,  or  sacrilege  which  profanes, 
in  the  organization  of  a  party  whose  elements  are  justice  to 
all,  mercy  to  all,  protection  to  all,  education  for  all,  wages 
for  all,  toleration  to  all ;  none  so  strong  as  to  be  above  tho 


KEPLY   TO   THE   DEMOCRATIC   KEVIEW.  415 

law,  none  so  weak  as  to  fall  below  its  succor.  Just  and  equal 
law  shall  be  eyes  to  the  blind,  ears  to  the  deaf,  feet  to  the 
lame,  its  atmosphere  shall  brace  the  strong  man  in  his  jour- 
ney an<i  be  respired  by  the  infant  in  its  cradle,  and  vindicate 
its  supremacy  over  the  assassin's  knife,  assert  its  majesty 
over  the  madness  of  the  mob,  and  hear  the  lowest  note  of 
insulted  humanity. 

ABSTRACT   ABOLITION. 

But  the  Democratic  reviewer  says,  the  Liberty  party  has 
committed  great  mistakes,  and  says  "  he  has  no  reference  to 
the  general  question  pro  or  con,  of  the  Abolition  of  slavery," 
he  says  "  Abolition  and  Abolitionism  are  two  wholly  distinct 
things,"  and  that  many  look  with  favor  on  the  former  who 
are  firmly  opposed  to  the  latter. 

He  says,  we  ought  to  hate  slavery  and  love  the  slave- 
holder ;  and  that  this  is  the  great  and  capital  mistake  of  the 
Liberty  party.  He  understands  Abolition — hatred  of  slavery, 
in  the  abstract — to  be  one  thing,  while  Abolitionism  is  a 
sincere  opposition  to  slavery  and  its  supporters,  taking  active 
means  for  its  overthrow,  and  a  very  different  thing.  This 
latter  sort  shocks  our  Democratic  reviewer.  This  distinc- 
tion is  not  so  original,  as  to  entitle  him  to  a  patent  for  its 
discovery.  But  as  here  lies  the  great  mistake  of  these  "  one 
idea"  men,  it  may  be  well  to  fasten  our  attention  to  it.  The 
reviewer's  proposition,  in  Democratic  English  is  this,  abstract 
Abolition  is  a  hatred  of  abstract  slavery,  without  attempting 
immediately,  or  remotely,  to  give  liberty  to  a  single  slave ; 
that  is  prime  Abolition,  in  his  opinion,  such  as  will  pass  current, 
with  the  reviewer,  and  even  the  slaveholders  themselves.  He 
assures  us,  many  slaveholders  entertain  great  respect  for 
Abolition  of  this  type,  and  therefore  the  reviewer  seems  to 
admit  that  this  kind  or  sort  must  be  correct.  But  Abolition- 
ism, which  forms  associations,  applies  hard  arguments,  strong 


416  ALVAN   STEWART. 

reasons,  for  immediate  emancipation,  and  uses  the  ballot-box, 
and  all  constitutional  power,  to  make  itself  felt  for  the  over- 
throw of  this  terrible  sin,  this  is  outright  fanaticism  and  all 
wrong.  The  reviewer's  Abolition  is  to  think  right  -but  do 
nothing.  To  illustrate  his  position,  it  is  like  this  :  My  inno- 
cent friend  has  unjustly  been  torn  from  me,  and  immured  in 
a  dungeon,  and  the  reviewer's  doctrine  is,  I  may  think  my 
friend  was  unjustly  imprisoned  and  ought  to  be  out ;  but  says 
one,  "  why  do  you  not  apply  for  a  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus 
and  have  your  friend  brought  up  before  the  judge,  and  dis- 
charged ?"  But  I  reply,  "  how  dare  you  give  me  such  mad 
and  fanatical  advice  ?  You  talk  like  a  modern  Abolitionist. 
Do  you  not  know,  sir,  that  there  is  the  breadth  of  the  earth's 
diameter  between  believing  my  friend  is  wrongfully  impri- 
soned, and  the  taking  the  first  step  for  his  deliverance  ?  Sir, 
you  are  demented  I  I  will  not  take  one  measure  for  his  dis- 
charge, he  may  He  and  rot  there,  and  the  ants  may  carry  his 
mortal  remains  through  the  keyhole  of  his  dungeon  before 
I  move  in  the  matter.  I  am  as  much  opposed  to  his  being  in 
the  dungeon  as  any  man  alive,  and  there  my  duty  ends." 
Abolitionists  not  having  the  faculty  to  love  slaveholders  and 
hate  slavery,  the  reviewer  says,  is  our  great  mistake.  A  man 
has  a  daughter  kidnapped  and  enslaved  in  a  brick  yard,  she 
is  compelled  by  the  power  of  the  lash,  amidst  tears  and  blood, 
to  make  brick.  A  neighbor  hears  the  father  of  the  poor 
captive  calling  the  enslaver  of  his  child  a  robber,  a  thief,  a 
fiend,  an  incarnate  devil.  "  Hush !"  says  the  neighbor  to  the 
father,  "  you  may  curse  the  enslaving  of  your  child  as  an  ab- 
straction, but  you  must  entertain  nothing  but  love  and  res- 
pect for  her  enslaver  ;  he,  the  enslaver  of  your  child,  is  an 
hospitable,  chivalrous  fellow,  generous  as  a  prince  in  his  house, 
keeps  the  best  pack  of  hounds,  the  finest  stud  of  blood  and 
racehorses,  of  any  man  in  the  country ;  and  just  please  to 
remember,  there  are  forty  fathers  and  mothers  whose  sons 


EEPLY   TO   THE   DEMOCEATIC   EEVIEW.  417 

and  daughters  are  toiling  with  your  daughter,  in  the  same 
brick  yard,  whose  children  he  took  and  carried  off  with  your 
daughter ;  and,  again,  it  is  the  peculiar  institution  and  the 
peculiar,  mode  of  making  brick  adopted  by  this  gentleman." 
Says  the  neighbor,  "  condemn  sin  and  not  the  sinner,  slavery 
but  not  the  slaveholder."  "  Ah !"  says  the  agonized  father, 
"  was  there  ever  sin  without  a  sinner,  or  slavery  without  a 
slaveholder  ?"  If  our  Democratic  reviewer's  ideas  of  moral 
responsibility  are  right,  the  whole  world  is  wrong ;  he  vir- 
tually says,  "  Hang  the  murder,  and  let  the  murderer  most 
affectionately  go  free;  most  lovingly  discharge  the  horse- 
thief,  and  send  grand  larceny  to  the  State  prison ;  set  free 
with  a  kiss  the  midnight  burglar,  and  send  his  indictment  for 
burglary  to  the  penitentiary ;  the  house-burner  we  should 
embrace  with  great  endearments,  but  stretch  his  arson  on  the 
gibbet."  If  this  is  so,  society  has  made  a  grand  mistake,  in 
erecting  penitentiaries,  jails,  dungeons  and  castles,  where  the 
criminals  they  confine  should  have  never  been,  but  rather 
should  have  been  cheered  by  loving  smiles,  have  moved  as 
the  elite  of  the  grand  and  fashionable  world — the  true  beau 
monde  of  high-minded  eccentricities.  Then  let  all  the  ab- 
stract crimes  of  this  world  of  ours  be  forever  hung,  burnt, 
cropped,  whipped  and  imprisoned  in  some  lady's  thimble, 
which  would  hold  it  all  (with  rooms  to  let],  and  let  this  thim- 
ble stand  on  some  Jesuit's  table,  warning  the  generations  of 
men,  as  they  come  and  go,  that  the  true  road  to  the  love  and 
affections  of  mankind  is  in  the  commission  of  the  highest 
crimes,  and  that  the  everlasting  writhings  of  these  unpardoned 
abstractions  of  criminality,  in  the  thimble,  stand  as  in  bold 
relief  to  vindicate  the  -justice  of  this  world  in  condemning 
crimes,  and  loving  criminals. 

KE-CESSIO^    OF    THE    10    MILES    SQUAKE. 

After  expressing  great  distress,  on  the  part  of  the  Re- 
18* 


418  ALVAN   STEWAKT. 

viewer,  at  Mr.  Calhoun's  having  nationalized  slavery  and 
stripped  it  of  all  locality,  as  an  institution,  he  fears  a  tremen- 
dous eruption  of  the  Northern  Abolitionists,  into  the  houses 
of  Congress,  by  petitions  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  Dictrict  and 
the  internal  slave  trade,  at  the  next  session  of  Congress,  and 
to  get  rid  of  such  fearful  injuries  to  the  Democratic  party, 
and  the  liberties  of  this  nation,  he  comes  out  with  his  grand 
Panacea,  to  arrest  our  Vandal  career,  that  is,  by  ceding 
back  the  ten  miles  square  to  the  States  of  Virginia  and  Mary- 
land, and  thus  preserve  the  unspeakable  blessings  of  slavery, 
and  the  slave  trade,  as  State  institutions,  which  can  no  longer 
be  defended  as  national  ones.  This  is  all  the  great  Demo- 
cratic party,  in  the  hours  of  its  transports  at  its  success,  can 
undertake  to  do,  for  the  cause  of  human  liberty,  and  the  ele- 
vation of  the  masses  in  the  new  world  !  The  world  is  likely 
thereby,  to  be  involved  in  a  debt  of  gratitude,  so  overwhelm- 
ing in  amount,  that  insolvency  will  be  the  only  mode  of  meet- 
ing the  interest,  and  repudiation  of  discharging  the  principal. 

THE   PROSPECTS    OF   LIBERTY.       1846. 

Some  very  judicious  and  prudent  liberty-men,  hope  and  be- 
lieve that  the  coming  winter  will  open  a  new  drama  flattering 
in  character,  auspicious  with  new-born  hopes,  in  revealing  to 
us  large  accessions  to  the  army  of  liberty,  recruited  from 
the  ranks  of  the  thinking  and  considerate,  who  will  forever 
forswear  ah1  allegiance  to  that  baleful  and  mysterious  power, 
exercised  by  the  slaveholders  from  the  foundations  of  the 
Republic,  to  uphold  Southern  slavery  and  destroy  Northern 
freedom.  This  hope  is  borne  up  in  the  arms  of  the  Wilnaot 
Proviso,  by  which  men  could  manifest  the  exact  amount  of 
abhorrence  each  one  entertained  against  slavery,  in  the 
most  abstract  sense  of  language,  without  stopping  to  consi- 
der the  effect  of  the  Constitution  of  the  Union,  State  legisla- 
tion or  implied  or  express  compromises. 


LAWS,    RESPONSIBLE   FOE    SLAVERY.  4:19 

Such  an  hour  and  such  a  day  it  was  believed  had  come, 
when  the  timid  might,  safely  be  brave,  the  weak  become 
strong,  when  casuistry  would  lie  speechless  before  frankness, 
and  double  dealing  would  be  superseded  by  simplicity,  and 
truth  would  walk  over  the  field  without  an  antagonist,  while 
the  powers  of  inhumanity  would  be  tongue-tied  from  inability 
to  reply  to  these  great  aphorisms,  that  a  man  is  a  man  the 
world  over,  and  while  innocent  has  always  a  better  right  to 
his  own  body  than  any  other  person  within  the  limits  of  the 
universe.  It  would  seem  that  the  noble  proviso  of  Wilmot 
must  bring  the  mind  of  man  to  stand  in  front  of  the  full  blaze 
of  the  light  of  Nature  and  there  behold  man  as  he  comes  from 
his  Creator,  before  he  is  ever  injured  by  cruelty  or  appropri- 
ated by  avarice.  No  legislative  conscience-plasters  are  here 
spread  over  the  question,  to  impair  the  natural  sensibilities 
of  the  human  mind. 

THE   LAWS -MADE   THE    SCAPE-GOAT. 

All  legislation  by  which  one  man's  liberty  is  taken  from  him 
and  given  to  another,  as  a  matter  of  advantage,  is  nothing 
but  an  attempt  of  the  body  politic  to  take  the  responsibility 
of  the  sin,  which  it  is  supposed  could  not  be  borne  by  the 
slaveholder,  as  an  individual.  Sad  would  have  been  the  con- 
dition of  the  slaveholder,  had  he  not  converted  his  private 
iniquity  into  a  law,  and  the  slaveholding  community  aggre- 
gated and  yoked  together  the  most  horrible  and  frightful  of 
individual  wrongs  and  outrages  ever  put  forth  by  man  against 
man,  and  then  breathed  into  those  atrocities  the  breath  of 
law  and  called  them  legal  and  peculiar  institutions.  Thus 
the  bold  ruffians  who  laid  the  foundations  of  slavery  in 
blood,  by  force  of  the  pistol,  the  rifle,  the  bloodhound  and 
the  chain,  instead  of  making  the  personal  might  of  their  own 
bloody  arms  the  only  tenure  by  which  their  supremacy  was 
proclaimed  over  their  man,  came  together  in  legislative 


420  ALVAN   8TEWAKT. 

assemblies,  and  asked  the  State  to  become  their  champion 
and  wear  their  fearful  honors,  and  under  the  idea  of  organic 
sin,  to  become  the  scape-goat  to  bear  into  the  \vilderness 
transgressions  too  heavy  for  men,  as  individuals,  to  bear. 
Thus  when  conscience  cried  against  the  crime,  when  the 
stones  of  the  street  unlocked  their  marble  jaws  and  cried 
"shame"  and  "murder,"  the  individual  might  point  to  the 
statute  book  and  say,  "  there  is  the  sinner ;  I  am  holy ;  a 
law-honoring  man.  Let  the  wrath  of  the  Eternal,  and  of  all 
good  men,  be  poured  out  on  the  session  laws  of  South  Caro- 
lina, but  never,  oh !  never  let  them  impute  wrong  to  those 
who  call  in  the  aid  of  those  statute  laws." 

Let  this  logic  prevail,  and  the  wicked  men  of  a  State  may 
repeal  every  law  of  Heaven,  and  set  the  Eternal  at  defiance, 
and  at  the  day  of  judgment  plead  in  bar  of  God's  law  the 
session  laws  of  South  Carolina.  And  if  the  plea  is  good 
for  this  world,  as  an  organic  sin-plea,  it  will  be  a  perfect  bar 
to  accountability  in  the  next.  For  what  is  right  and  availa- 
ble in  the  eye  of  moral  justice  in  this  transitory  world,  will 
be  so  when  the  sun  and  moon  shall  set  to  rise  no  more.  Yes, 
when  the  judgment  day  shall  have  come  and  gone.  Yes,  and 
forever.  That  which  was  right  here,  will  never  be  wrong  in 
the  revolving  circles  of  eternity.  Right  is  a  straight  line 
running  through  time  and  eternity.  Man  can  never  crook  it. 
It  is  a  line  surveyed  by  the  Almighty, 


THE  END. 


KEFEKENCE  TO  PKINCIPAL  TOPICS. 


Army  of  Liberation 40 

Abolitionists  Misrepresented 51 

"  Crimeof    59 

Abstract  Slavery *. 54 

Abolition,  Age  of 61 

Abolitionists  Above  Board 67 

Abolitionism  Dying 71 

American  Sentiment  and  Legislation 73 

Abolitionists,  What  have  they  done? 91 

Archives  Buried 120 

Anthropophagi 216 

Abolitionists,  their  Difficulties 261 

Angel  of  Deliverance 849 

Abolition,  Abstract  871,  415 

Actofl793 876 

Abolitionists,  the  Balance  of  power  Party 409 

B. 

Bowdown,  John Ill 

Banded  Power Ill 

Ballot-box 234,  890 

Bailey,  Dr.,  Letter  to 251,  863 

Ballot-box 267 

Bible,  iti  Teachings 823 

c. 

Constitution  and  Slavery 72 

Color  in  a  Quandary 96 

Colonizing,  the  Effect  of 102 

Constitution 108 

Cain  and  Abel,  First  Issue 131 

Chorus  of  Freedmen 145 

Columbia  District  of 163,  417 

421 


422  REFERENCE   TO   PEIXCIPAL   TOPICS. 


Constitutioncides 171 

Congress,  Power  of 175 

Clay,  Speech  in  answer  to 195 

Columbia,  Speech  in  relation  to 105 

Conversation  between  Bride  and  Bridegroom 207,  203 

Committee,  Report  of,  on  Slavery 209 

Committee  National,  Address  of 2S4 

Colonization  Society 259 

Canada  Mission 260 

Congress,  Law  of 296 

Constitution  of  New  Jersey 272,  314 

Commands  of  God 829 

Constitution,  an  Anti-Slavery  Document 833 

Clergymen,  Duty  of 157 

Clergymen  upholding  Slavery 403 

Constitution,  Origin  and  Object  of 404 

D. 

Declaration  of  Independence 41,  44,  250 

Dissolution  of  the  Union 65 

Dough-faces 110 

Desertion  from  the  Ranks 110 

Duty  to  refute  Slander Ill 

December  21st,  1887 119,  120 

Democrats  and  the  South 243 

Democratic  Profession  and  Practice 410 

Democrats  yield  to  Southern  Threats  422 

Democrats,  Servility  of 413 


England's  Glory Cl 

Education,  Perverted Ill 

Ecclesiastical  Recreancy 112 

Egypt  against  the  Hebrews 132 

Expediency 181 

Essay,  expected  from  Whig  and  Democrats 243 

English  Slavery 2S2 

English  Feudal  Law 2S5 

England's  Judiciary 290 

Egypt  and  the  Jews 828 

Egyptian  Plagues 825 

F. 

Fathers,  Voice  of  the 60 

Free  Speech 84 

Free  Soil 113 

Fourth  of  July  Orations 821 


REFERENCE   TO   PRINCIPAL   TOPICS.  423 

G. 

Goodell,  William. 26 

.  Gaggers 113 

Gilmer,  Gov.,  Letter  to 219 

Ghent,  Treaty  of. 802 

H. 

Hod-carriers  of  Slavery 149 

Habeas  Corpus,  Argument  in  case  of 272 

Homine  Replegiando 2ST 

Holley,  Myron 402 

I. 

Issue,  neglecting  the  True Ill 

Issues  between  Right  and  Wrong 129 

Idumea  s  Blight 186 

L. 

Liberty's  Imperial  Guard 109 

Labor,  Mode  of 113 

Liberty,  Temple  of 160 

Law  of  Nations 291 

Law  of  Nature 803 

Laws  made  the  Scape  Goat 419 

M. 

Mob,  at  Utica,  in  1885 12 

Marcy,  Governor,  Letter  to 58 

Mobs,  Panacea  for  Errors  of  Opinion 68 

Mahomet's  Coffin 112 

Marts  of  Blood •. 176 

Murder  Judicial 189 

Mansfield  Lord 258,  293 

May  Flower 279 

Massachusetts,  Decision  of. 814 

Man,  his  Dignity 817 

"      "  Rights  Inalienable 819 

Mount  Vernon  862 

Ministers,  Debate  with 869 

N. 

The  Abject  North 45 

Noah  against  the  World 132 

No-Tongue  Men 148 

North  Star— Slave's  Compass 211 

New  Jersey,  Slavery  in 272 

Nations,  Law  of 2el 


4:24  REFERENCE   TO    PRINCIPAL   TOPICS. 


Nature,  Law  of 303 

Nile,  running  Blood 825 

New  York,  Revision  of  Constitution 855 

Nancy's  Case 8T9 

New  York  bowing  to  Tirgliiia 402 

O. 

One  Idea 49 

Omissions  in  GOT.  Marcy'g  Message 83 

Organization 896 

Omnibus,  Slaveholding 899 

P. 

Pierpont,  Rev.  John,  Letter 24 

Port  Byron  Convention. 26 

Political  Parties 48 

Powers  Surrendered 64 

Piracy  Continued 93 

Petition,  Right  of 113 

Philadelphia  Hall,  Speeches  in »  117,  129 

"     Burningof 155  to  159 

Political  Division 180 

Proclamation,  Virginia's 223 

Prospects  of  Freedom 246 

Plagues  of  Egypt 825 

Parents,  duty  to 1ST 

Parent  and  Child,  Slavery  assimilated  to 894 

Power,  Every  Man 401 

R. 

Reformers  maligned. 108 

Redeemer,  Advent  of 133 

Reformation,  The 189 

Revolution,  The  American 146 

Religion  and  Legislation 191 

Reserved  Rights 859 

8. 

Stewart,  Alvan,  as  an  Anti-Slavery  Man 9 

Smith,  Gerrit 83 

Scope  of  this  Book. 40 

Ship  of  State 42 

Sycophancy  invades  the  College 110 

Success,  Ultimate  114 

States,  Duty  of 171 

Southern  Threats 179 

Southampton  Massacre, 251 


REFERENCE   TO   PRINCIPAL    TOPICS.  425 


Sharpe,  Granville  ...........................................................  253,  295 

South,  Cost  of  Defence  of  .........................................................  258 

Self-ownership  ...............  ..................................................  274 

South  Carolina  could  only  take  Care  of  Herself  .......................  .............  283 

Somerset's  Case  ...............................................................  293 

Slavery  Right,  Colton's  Argument  ................................................  893 

Slavery,  its  Recoil  ...............................................................  48 

Slavery,  View  of  .................................................................  89 

Slaveholders  foiled  ...............................................................  92 

Southern  Chivalry  ...............................................................  95 

Slaveholders  unmasked  ..........................................................  98 

Slave  Trade,  Internal  and  Foreign  ................................................  99 

"           Comparison  of  the  Two  .............................................  100 

"           Horrors  of  this  Traffic  ...............................................  101 

"           Importance  of  Abolishing  ...........................................  102 

Slavery  Arraigned  ...............................................................  108 

Slavery  palsies  Thrift  ............................................................  115 

Slaves,  Do  they  desire  Liberty  ?  ..................................................  115 

Slaveholders'  Shame  .............................................................  123 

Slavery,  Report  on  ...............................................................  124 

Slaveholding  Catechism  .........................................................  190 

Slaves'  Condition  here  and  hereafter  .............................................  198 

Slaveholder  Travelling  on  Proceeds  of  his  Children  ................................  206 

Slavery,  Curses  of  ...............................................................  288 

"       in  the  Abstract  .........................................................  238 

"       what  it  has  done  .......................................................  248 

"       of  old  ..................................................................  2T8 

Slave  Ship,  the  First  ............................................................  280 

Slave  Law  .....................................................................  296 

Slavery,  Institution  of  .  ..........................................................  299 

Slave's  Fall  ......................................................................  1ST 

Slavery,  a  Bible  Institution  .........  .  ..........................................  856 

Slaveholders,  Debate  with  ......................................................  875 

T. 
Thompson,  George,  his  Letter  ....................................................    18 

Tappan  Lewis,  Letter  to  .........................................................    1* 

Turner,  Nat  .....................................................................  113 

Thing-Representatives  in  Congress  ................................................  165 

Tinkem,  of  Trenton  ..............................................................  ^ 

Theories,  reversed  ................................................................  *** 


u. 

Unionists 

Union,  dissolution  of 

Union  dissolved 

Union-Splitters. 


426  REFERENCE   TO   PRINCIPAL   TOPICS. 

V. 

PAtfK 

Vermont 110 

Vote,  Duty  to 112 

Vermont,  Speech  before  Legislature 160 

"        The  Freemen  of 161 

"        Foremost  for  Liberty 168 

Virginia's  Demand  on  New  York  of  three  Colored  Men 219 

"        Land,  Dilapidated ; 861 

Vermont,  Visit  to 866 

Volcano,  Constitutional 891 

w. 

Whittier,  Letter 26 

Weld,  Theodore  D 85 

War  of  1812 4T 

War-Steed  of  Anti-Slavery 114 

Webb,  Samuel,  Letters  to 155,  248 

Whig  Party  subservient  to  Slavery. 289 

Washington,  City  of,  its  Capture 284,  8T2 

West  Indies....  803 


THE 

IMPENDING    CRISIS 

or 

THE    SOUTH: 

HOW    TO    MEET    IT. 

BY   H.   R.    HELPER, 

Or  NORTU    CAROLINA. 

A  handsome  12mo.  volume  of  420  paget.     Price    $1  00. 

From  lion.  William,  ff.  Sncard. 

"  I  hare  read  '  The  Impending  Crisis  of  the  South'  with  deep  attention.  It  seems  U 
••  a  work  of  great  merit,  rich,  yet  accurate,  in  statistical  Information,  and  logical  la 
analysis." 

From  Rto.  T/ieortore  Parker. 

"It  is  an  admirable  work.  No  man  has  hitherto  made  so  complete  »  collection  of 
the  facts,  and  none  put  them  In  such  '  magnificently  stern  array.'  " 

From  Hon.  C<ts*iu»  M.  Clny. 

"It  is  Just  suc^i  a  work  as  la  needed  In  the  present  array  of  political  antagonisms. 
•The  statistics  are  compact,  lucid,  and  logically  presented.  The  tone  of  the  author  is 
manly,  outspoken,  and  patriotic.  I  regard  it  as  the  best  compend  of  all  the  argument* 
against  this  our  country's  greatest  woe,  S-itxery,  yet  published.  No  intelligent  citizen 
should  fail  to  place  it  in  his  library.  The  bookcrafl  of  the  work  is  of  very  fine  style,  and 
creditable  to  the  publishers. 

From  Ho*.  Jonhvti  R.  Giddiny»,  of  O'd->. 

"It  is  a  manual  for  the  times,  calculated  to  meet  the  popular  demand  for  Inform* 
tion  upon  the  great  question  of  the  age." 

Extracts  from  a  review  of  8  oolumnt  in  tfi«  .Y«to  York  Tri/>,,nf. 
"Fortunate,  Indeed,  are  the  non-slaveholdlng  whites,  that  they  have  found  such  a 
spokesman  ;  one  who  utters  no  stammering,  hesitating,  nor  uncertain  sound,  who  pos- 
sesses a  perfect  mastery  of  his  mother  tongue,  who  speaks  as  well  from  a  long  study 
and  full  knowledge  of  his  subject  as  from  profound  convictions,  and  In  whose  rocabular  j 
the  words  fear  and  doubt  seem  to  hare  no  place." 

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